Why this idea means business : We explore the challenges of creative leadership. Learn the 3 biggest leadership blockers to creativity and how to overcome them. Read this for ideas on leading more creatively.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To remove barriers to creativity to improve the impact of your innovation activity. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – Innovation
- Skill area – Creativity
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. monthly purchases from innovation adoption = +95
- Est. sales increase = +$9.5k (monthly) | +$112k (annual)
We rarely write about leadership.
For a start, it’s already discussed too much online (especially on LinkedIn). And much of what’s written is full of waffle and woo-woo.
However, we get more interested when the leadership discussion is about how to :-
- shape the business’s creative culture.
- lower the barriers to creativity.
For example, we’ve just read Sir John Hegarty’s excellent Hegarty on Advertising. It’s full of useful creative inspiration about why and how “leadership” should encourage creativity.
This was much more compelling than the regular big company LinkedIn boasts about innovation. Which are usually nothing more than boring bandwagon-jumping brand extensions to drive market penetration (from the Ansoff matrix). True creative leadership does much more than that.
Creative leadership - Why leadership teams find it hard
Hegarty focuses on creativity in advertising but also discusses how creativity works with clients. His experience is that creativity is a hard sell in business.
We’ve found this too. There’s often a creative leadership block at the top of any business, and it’s usually driven by :-
- the binary view of creative and operations.
- creativity isn’t seen as a leadership skill.
- leadership politics.
The binary view of creative and operations
One theory suggests that businesses work in different “modes”. (See our creative thinking ideas article for more on this).
In creative mode, you look to the future and use thought processes like reviewing, reflecting, speculating and experimenting.
Operations mode, on the other hand, aims to optimise the current business. It’s about routines, procedures and rules.
Smart businesses get both modes to work together.
They think creatively about the future and adapt their current operations to head towards that future.
However, in many businesses, these modes don’t connect. Instead, they grate against each other. They become an either-or binary decision, and the modes compete rather than complement each other.
This leadership decision-making car crash normally happens when the modes collide in the boardroom.
Binary thinking in the boardroom
You just have to look at who’s in the room when big business decisions are made.
CEOs with a creative background are rare. Finance and sales are still the most likely functions to hoist you into the hot seat.
Supporting your uncreative CEO, you usually find 4 functions with an operational focus – finance (including IT), regulatory / legal, HR, operations and supply chain.
These functions make the business run efficiently. They protect its interests and aim to prevent mistakes. But they’re not driven by creative thinking and often raise barriers to creativity.
That leaves 3 functions that are usually more in favour of creativity. Marketing, R&D and (sometimes, if it suits them), sales. So, in a “vote” on a creative idea, the 5 who prefer safer choices outvote the 3 who are more open to higher risk but higher reward creative options.
When a business needs to push a more breakthrough innovation or approve a more challenging creative communication, the boardroom usually says no. It plays it safe. And safe isn’t how you be creative.
Breaking the binary barrier
The main ways to break through these boardroom barriers are :-
- education on creative thinking.
- collaborative and constructive creativity.
Education on creative thinking
First, there’s an education job to do on creative thinking for all those who make it to the top table. Even marketing, R&D and sales aren’t always trained on this, as creativity is often farmed out to agencies and consultants.
So you start with the benefits. You show how ideas drive innovation, build competitive advantage and improve customer experience. These drive sales and profits. You need creative ideas to win customers and for your brand to succeed.
Then, you outline the creative process and its challenges. The need to generate many ideas. How these then stimulate more ideas. And then how you craft those ideas into concepts, designs and plans that you roll out to customers.
And lastly, you explain creativity’s inherent unpredictability. There are no guarantees with creativity. You show that despite following the process, new ideas won’t always work out. A big part of great creative leadership is being OK with this unpredictability.
Collaborative and constructive creativity
The other key to cracking business creativity is collaborative working. This isn’t about being agreeable all the time. Saying yes to everything. It’s about having an eye on the big idea, and sharing constructive feedback so that teams deliver the best creative work.
However, this rarely happens. Creative ideas are often seen as threats to people’s political status (more on this shortly). So, you get destructive feedback which crushes creativity and kills ideas. Not great creative leadership behaviours.
Instead, the focus should be on encouraging and improving ideas. For example, our creative approval article shares Amazon’s “institutional yes” approach. You propose an idea and assume you can do it unless someone builds a clear case for why you shouldn’t. This sometimes leads to ideas that don’t work. But it also means you try many more ideas. And overall, you find many more that do work.
Great creative leadership teams drive this type of creative thinking.
Creativity isn’t seen as a leadership skill
This brings us to our second creative leadership block. In most businesses, creativity isn’t seen as a key leadership skill. Quite the opposite. Instead, getting on the board seems to require doing lots of very routine but uncreative tasks. So board members are used to being bored.
As discussed earlier, more than half the leaders reach the top table without ever working in a creative role. Yet ironically, creativity and creative thinking could enhance the impact of all those other operational functions.
Yes, we know what “creative accounting” means. But if finance teams better understood how innovation works, they could better allocate budgets to projects that would deliver better returns.
Similarly, regulatory and legal teams are rarely comfortable with creativity. Yet, many regulations and laws are open to interpretation. If approval teams were more open to creativity, you’d have a higher chance of getting breakthrough ideas away.
You can also improve how your HR, operations and supply chain teams solve their everyday problems by training them in creative problem-solving. On how to generate more ideas that keep employees happy and make the business run more efficiently.
Build a creative culture
Building on our earlier point about educating on the benefits of creative thinking, you also have to enable people to put into practice what they learn.
Strong creative leadership teams look for opportunities to give people more scope and flexibility to be creative. They build a culture that sets up teams, the working environment and systems and resources to encourage and reward creativity.
For example, this often means smaller teams working in a more agile way. They’re given a broad problem to tackle but have the autonomy and power to decide on how best to solve it.
For that to happen, more leaders need to be people who’ve lived this creative experience. Who believe in it. Who’ve worked in agile teams and seen the benefits. Faster decision-making. Higher quality ideas. And more personal motivation and job satisfaction.
Leadership politics
This brings us to the final and toughest challenge to creative leadership capability. The soul-sucking shitshow that is company politics.
For a start, when the business has shareholders, the leadership team mostly puts their interests first. Shareholders can get rid of the CEO. And in most cases, they’ll do so if they don’t get a quick and reliable return on their investment.
However, this isn’t a great fit with creative thinking.
Creativity requires experimentation. That means some ideas don’t work. But leadership teams are generally bad at explaining this to shareholders (or don’t do it at all). This is why you end up with leadership teams approving “safe” operational projects and rejecting “riskier” creative ones.
However, this isn’t what “leadership” is about, particularly creative leadership. The “keep the shareholders” happy approach is more stewardship than leadership. Stewards keep the current business ticking over. But they don’t steer the business ship into more favourable waters.
Heading towards true creative leadership
We talked earlier about how leadership is often over-discussed. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have a role.
Leadership is about working out where the business needs to be in the future and steering it towards that desired goal.
In terms of creative leadership, this is about creating the right culture for creativity to thrive. And making sure that nothing gets in the way of it. That includes any petty internal politics and self-interest.
Leadership teams need to step back from championing their functional teams or their own status. If they act with open-mindedness and integrity, they make decisions which benefit everyone. The business will thrive.
It means they get close to customers to better understand them. They focus on building brilliant brands and solving problems creatively. Creativity is encouraged and rewarded. The political play-it-safe crew get benched and the experimenters and breakthrough thinkers take centre stage to lead the business.
If creative leadership is your goal, then building a business capable of creating brilliant ideas is how you get there. As Hegarty puts it in his book, “Ideas are the most incredible thing we possess. They can change the future of brands, of countries and of the course of history. They engage, entertain and stimulate, encouraging debate, dissent and adoration.”
What leadership team doesn’t want to (creatively) deliver that?
Conclusion - The challenges of creative leadership and how to overcome them
Doing new things is hard. It’s why many people fear creativity. But, if you want great creative leadership, you must break through those hard things and deal with those fears.
There are 3 main challenges for leadership teams if they want their business to be more creative.
First, they need to break the traditional binary way of thinking about creativity and operations. They’re not separate but symbiotic.
The most successful companies find ways to make both modes synchronise so that they amplify rather than aggravate each other.
Then, they need to encourage and emphasise the value of creativity within leadership roles. That’s about educating people in all functions and at all levels about its benefits. And it’s about giving them opportunities to gain experience and learn creative problem-solving skills.
And lastly, it’s about taking the politics out of creativity. About seeing it as a must-have to drive future business growth. Accepting its inherent opportunities and risks, and promoting and rewarding those who show true creative leadership.
Check out our creative thinking guide and our creative culture article for more on this. Or get in touch if you need a more creative view on building creative leadership in your business.
Note – this article was one of our most popular reads in 2024.
Photo credits
Creative skills multicoloured parachute (adapted) : Photo by Chad Walton on Unsplash
Hand / Stop (adapted) : Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Thumbs down : Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Hammer : Photo by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash
Three people pointing at laptop : Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Bored in front of computer : Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash
Two men working together at a desk : Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash
Angry face : Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
Steer Ship : Photo by Nathan Lindahl on Unsplash
