Creativity and Leadership

In a changing world not only do organizations need to innovate to survive, they need to innovate quicker than the competition. Creativity is essential for innovation but is very difficult to manage; indeed many leaders consider it too elusive and intangible to be managed. So says Amabile et al., in their October 2008 HBR article “Creativity and the role of the leader”, reprint R0810G. Following a Harvard Business School colloquium on the subject, the authors summarize that “you can’t manage creativity, but you can manage for creativity.” In order to enhance organizational creativity, leaders should therefore consider three key practices.

Here’s how to enhance organizational creativity followed by further implications (“et alors”).

Creativity and Leadership

The recommendations for leaders to foster the conditions in which creativity flourish are as follows:

Elicit ideas from all ranks

·         Stop thinking that you have the best ideas; most of the best ideas come from the “ranks”.

·         Make it safe to fail: stress the goal is to experiment constantly, and learn early from failure.

·         Motivate people by giving positive feedback, asking questions and encouraging the team.

Open up to diverse perspectives

·         Recruit and develop diverse staff: diversity enhances creativity.

·         Get people of different disciplines, backgrounds and expertise to share their thinking.

·         Avoid suppressing all or parts of people’s identity.

Correctly impose controls

·         Don’t impose controls during the “discovery” phase of ideas. Brainstorm openly.

·         Protect those doing creative work from conformist forces within the organization.

·         Create a filtering mechanism in the commercial phase, possibly using third parties.

Et alors

An engineering professor at this colloquium noted that most companies have hierarchical structures and differences in status among people impede the exchange of ideas. If the hierarchy is maintained but leaders want to overcome this challenge (and implement the above practices), the same professor suggested two solutions: 1/ in the longer term, the reward system has to be changed: those who are rewarded should be those who help others succeed; and 2/ in the immediate, management’s mission should be to get people to “shut up” and listen when appropriate. Indeed with the demands of day-to-day management and exigencies of operational excellence, talent development and listening are often overlooked…

Various research concludes that a culture of assimilation reduces heterogeneity and leads to “groupthink”, hence the recommendation to avoid suppressing people’s identity; however even suppressing parts of people’s identity can be detrimental to creativity. Research demonstrated that persons with higher identity “integration” (e.g. being female and an engineer) displayed higher levels of creativity. The implication is that if leaders can encourage identity integration (where for example women can be women and engineers, not just engineers) then people may be more innovative. Hence the recommendation to avoid suppressing (even) parts of people’s identity!