What are the characteristics of a creative leadership team?
Václav Havel, first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was also the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until its dissolution in 1992. Havel is considered one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century.
Havel was a creative thinker, writer, philosopher, dissident and reformer. His essay ‘The Power and the Powerless’ written in 1978 was a penetrating analysis of totalitarian authority and how people resist it foreshadowed the fall of the Czech Republic. In 2012, Havel’s wife authorised the creation of the ‘Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent’. This award celebrates ‘those who engage in creative dissent, exhibiting courage and creativity to challenge injustice and live in truth’.
Here, my interest in Havel is more to do with those who are ‘reformers’. Where do they come from? How do they operate? How do they survive? I am not focused on reforming a State but rather enterprises, organisations and firms.
This essay is related to two others. The first focussed on how we build our organisations for stability and what this says about our approach to change and its management. The second looked at why the foundations of our approach leadership are flawed, and why we might think about ‘creative pairs’ of leaders. I intend to extend these thoughts by considering the ‘creative leadership team’ as the driver of reform. It seemed apt as we all hear more and more about the good and bad of digitally driven disruption.
The most powerful forces in our organisations are those that enable the administration and distribution of knowledge; namely, the bureaucracy and professions. Bureaucrats protect the centrality of consistent process, while professionals protect the centrality of consistent technique. Bureaucrats and professionals both gain from opposing organisational reform. So where do reformers come from. I find Havel’s reflection on where dissidents come from interesting:
You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
Dissidents or reformers emerge from a desire to do well that places them in conflict with the prevailing system of governance. How do people in organisations end up in a ‘position of conflict’ with the organisation?
Our organisations go through a cycle of change that has four stages: conservation, release, reorganisation and exploitation. Together, exploitation and conservation comprise a slow, cumulative cycle, during which organisational resources are conserved. The organisation is largely stable and predictable—the bureaucracy and professions are dominant. As an organisation matures, it becomes more efficiently and tightly adapted to its environment and the entire system becomes progressively less flexible and responsive to external change. The organisation now has an internal strength that is capable of resisting or ignoring the need to change.
But the need for change can only be resisted for so long before misalignment leads to failure which initiates the second phase change: release and reorganisation. Reformers begin to emerge as the pressure for the organisation builds to move into this transition. In these phases, there is a release of accumulated (or previously trapped) organisational resources and there is a pressing need to reorganise them into to meet the demand for change.
This renewal is the stage where innovation and new opportunities are possible. This transition is disruptive as the forces of reformation and counter-reformation as reformers, bureaucrats and professionals battle for the right chart the path to the future.
Creative leadership teams are important in avoiding or limiting failure through strategic and operational misalignment but are also vital in charting the path to the future.
Why do leaders with the strongest of will and best of intentions find it difficult to sustain change in organisations?
We build into our organisations as sense of permanency and stability, which perversely focuses leadership attention on the short-term. Our feedback and learning loops are shortened as we contend with shoring up the here and now. The desire of leaders to fight for permanence and stability leads them to discount the future.
Despite the importance of creative leadership in our organisations, I am not advocating that it is the only desirable quality, nor is it ideal for an organisation to consist exclusively of creative leadership teams. The success of today comes from efficient managers exploiting the yesterday’s creativeness. Similarly, tomorrow’s success comes from today’s creativity. Consequently, just as we strive for greater organisational efficiency we also need to create the conditions for creative leadership.
I think create leadership groups are formed around the nucleus of creative leadership pairs. Military, political and scientific history has many examples of creative leadership teams that form around a small leadership nucleus. If successful, the size of the group grows but there will only ever be a leadership pair, or small number, at the centre.
What are the characteristics of creative leadership groups?
The leader is known and secure in leadership. To those outside the group, there is only one leader. The creative leadership pair will be seen to conform to hierarchy and fit into the governance structures of the organisation. Only one will be seen to be accountable for decision-making.
The team has a purpose not a mission. If creativity is treated as a ‘project’ it will fail to deliver lasting benefit.
Within the core of the team there is dialogue. Within the leadership pair, dialogue will be open and honest. This sense of trust will be visible through creative leadership team but stems from the strength of the bond at the core.
Confidence is important but trust is more important. The bond of confidence and trust between the leadership pair or nucleus of the group (I focus on pairs but it could be three but I suspect rarely more) will be strong and exclusive. It is worth dwelling on the difference on confidence and trust to understand why it might be important in creative leadership pairs.
Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argues that both confidence and trust refer to ‘expectations that may lapse into disappointments’. Confidence centres on the knowledge that routine expectations will be satisfied. To have confidence is to neglect the possibility of disappointment. We can have confidence that others will respond predictably. The day-to-day operation of organisations depends on confidence in our systems, process and colleagues. On the other hand, Luhmann argues that trust ‘presupposes a situation of risk’. Trust is about risking losses to make gains. For Luhmann, ‘trust is only required if a bad outcome would make you regret your action’. Unlike confidence, which depends on routine, trust emerges only as a part of decision and action. Creative leadership is largely about embracing uncertainty. It is inherently risky. Trust is within the leadership pair is essential to effectiveness. The erosion of trust is a critical failure.
If a leader is removed from the pair, it will not function. Creative leadership pairs emerge and dissolve naturally. Creative leadership pairs cannot be machined into existence through traditional ‘talent management’ processes. These processes in an attempt to ‘engineer leadership success’ may be tempted to split a successful pair in order to replicate success elsewhere. This rarely works as the bond between the pair often has intellectual, emotional and social origins—it is a relationship based on connection. If one is removed from the pair it becomes like an extinct volcano. As with real volcanos, it takes time to realise that it has become extinct. However, gradually, it becomes clear there is latent possibility but no catalyst for an eruption that will change the landscape.
The creative leadership team works in real time. The creative leadership team should work with real problems, in real time, to produce real outputs. Creative leadership depends on learning-by-doing. The team learns from and is stimulated by interacting with the business and customers. It is common to equate creative leadership with ‘design’. Creative leadership needs to be responsible for moving ideas from design to production to sales. Learning comes at all points in the cycle. The approach of segmenting creativity out of the day-to-day business limits the possibility of end-to-end learning that is essential to creative solutions.
The leadership of the team should have as much autonomy as possible. They must be able to pursue ideas and be accountable for the outcomes. It is not uncommon to strangle creativity with bureaucracy. This is not to say that the creative leadership pair operates independently or outside the organisation; rather, there is a need for latitude to pursue and implement.
The creative team must grow, or it will wither. The creative leadership team needs the constant stimulus of bigger challenges and more difficult problems. In growing, the creative leadership pair needs absolute discretion over team selection. It is attractive to think that a creative leadership team can be used as a development ground for others. This rarely works because selection and indoctrination into the culture and values of the team over time is critical. This is exclusively the responsibility of the creative leadership pair.
The group defines charts its own path. Compass and gyroscope not map
Individuals that manage the day-to-day come together in a leadership team that needs to be creative…collective imagination about the future.
The tendency is to land all creativity on an individual a la Jobs
More likely that there is a small team a nucleus around a clear leader.
If the group is successful the organisation may grow but most likely the size of the creative leadership team will not.
Here we are not talking about those that move the organisation forward incrementally but rather those that are most likely to change the game.
Sources
Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, pt. 1, sct. 14, Living in Truth, 1986 cited in The Columbia World of Quotations, Columbia University Press, 1996.
