What are the characteristics of a creative leadership team?

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.

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, foreshadowing 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 has 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 to 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 processes, while professionals protect the centrality of consistent techniques.  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 to take up this most unusual career one day. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility and a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in 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 conflicts with the prevailing system of governance. How do people in organisations end up in a ‘position of conflict’ with the organisation?

Our organisations undergo a change cycle with four stages: conservation, release, reorganisation and exploitation. 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 dominate. As an organisation matures, it becomes more efficient 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 capable of resisting or ignoring the need to change.

However, the need for change can only be resisted for so long before misalignment leads to failure, initiating the second phase of 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 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 to 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 will and best intentions find it difficult to sustain change in organisations?

We build into our organisations a sense of permanency and stability, which 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 yesterday’s creativeness. Similarly, tomorrow’s success comes from today’s creativity. Consequently, as we strive for greater organisational efficiency, we also need to create the conditions for creative leadership.

I think creative 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 the hierarchy and fit into the organisation's governance structures. 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 benefits.

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 the 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; it could be three, but I suspect rarely more) will be strong and exclusive. It is worth dwelling on the difference between confidence and trust to understand why it might be important in creative leadership pairs.

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argues that 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, processes 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 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 through traditional ‘talent management’ processes. In an attempt to ‘engineer leadership success’, these processes may be tempted to split a successful pair to replicate success elsewhere. This rarely works as the bond between the pair often has intellectual, emotional and social origins—a relationship based on connection. Removing one from the pair makes it like an extinct volcano. As with real volcanos, it takes time to realise it has become extinct. However, gradually, it becomes clear there is a 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 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 a development ground for others. This rarely works because selection and indoctrination into the team's culture and values over time is critical. This is exclusively the responsibility of the creative leadership pair.

• The group defines and charts its own path. Compass and gyroscope, not map.                                

• Individuals who manage the day-to-day come together in a leadership team that needs creativity and a collective imagination about the future.

• The tendency is to land all creativity on an individual, a la Steve Jobs

• More likely, there is a small team with 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 who move the organisation forward incrementally but rather those 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.