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Leading lights

Thought creative leadership meant group hugs and team bonding with nothing to do with quality? In the innovation economy that drives the 21st century business world, argues Patricia Curmi, creativity is fast being recognised as an essential component of success

For a long time, business was seen as the antithesis of creativity. Where leaders of commerce and industry were logical, fact-driven and stable, the thinking went, creative genius was unquantifiable, instinctive and difficult to harness.

Today, however, creative leadership is the new buzzword in the midst of a burgeoning 'innovation economy'. Even in the most traditional of institutions, it's no longer enough to simply rely on control and command management techniques. Companies like Google and Microsoft have been espousing the fact that their business is driven by creative leadership from the outset, but all sectors, from financial to manufacturing, can benefit.

It's not as though anyone would describe themselves as anti-creativity. There may be resistance to new ideas and new approaches to creative leadership, but few employees, or leaders for that matter, would argue against creative thinking. The problem instead lies with the confusion as to what creativity actually means on a day-to-day basis.

Gerard Puccio and his team might have the answer. One of the world's leading experts in creativity and leadership, he is the director of the world's first ever creativity focused education programme, the International Center for Studies in Creativity, New York University, and recently co-authored a book on the subject, Creative Leadership.

The history of the creative leadership movement can be traced back, in part, to the influence of one of Puccio's predecessors, Alex Osborn. Puccio explains:

'The catalyst, the visionary in this field, was Osborn. He was the inventor of brainstorming and he wrote a book called Applied Imagination. It was very popular, introducing creative problem solving as a method for deliberately tackling complex problems, problems that don't have easy answers.

'He thought that folks should have these skills and that they should be developed as part of their educational process because they're essential workplace skills. When you join the workforce you should be a flexible thinker and an original thinker and a creative problem solver and so forth, because that's what you get paid to do. And so he wanted to have an impact on the educational system. He started the Creative Education Foundation, then his initiative led to the founding of our department in 1967.'

What makes a leader?

The way that Puccio and his team connect creativity to leadership is by suggesting that what leaders and what leadership is about is an ability to solve complex problems - novel problems. This means that in order to discover a solution, you simply can't say: 'We had a problem like this two years ago or two weeks ago' because the circumstances have changed such that it requires you to look for a new solution. Those are the kinds of problems that leaders have to solve, or have to help others to solve.

But to the idea that leadership is a character trait and can't be taught, Puccio is adamantly opposed: 'Some people come into the world with certain abilities, innate qualities that will pre-dispose them to be more creative than others. But we also know that creativity and creative problem solving specifically is a trainable skill; there's no doubt, there's excellent research that supports that, there's more than seventy-some studies that have documented whether creativity training works'

Creative thinkers

In his book, Puccio asks what bridges the gap between an average manager and a creative leader? He points to a study conducted in 1985 by scientists Bennis and Nanus, who interviewed 60 successful CEOs and 30 outstanding public sector leaders and found a clear contrast between management and leadership.

Bennis and Nanus found that that management is driven by efficiency, a focus on mastering routine activities, whereas leadership is motivated by effectiveness. In some cases, the most effective methods for achieving important goals are not the more orthodox, familiar approaches, but rather experimental, imaginative ones that ultimately appear more risky. The leaders they interviewed were people who created new ideas, policies, and procedures. According to Bennis and Nanus: 'They changed the basic metabolism of their organisations.' Table 1 shows a similar study by Zaleznik in 1998 while table 2 illustrates some of the overlap between traits commonly connected to creative people and descriptions of effective leaders.

John Chisholm founded his bespoke consultancy company, Creative Leadership, in 2004. With a background in medical science, he has found countless willing teams in the NHS who have undertaken his creativity training course. As a master practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming, his approach may seem left-field to conventional thinkers - he espouses the values of creative tension within a team and sees little value in the traditional corporate away days that include kayaking and building bonfires - but his results have been impressive. His clients range from large companies to sports stars, and he believes there's no one size fits all approach to creative leadership. To him, leadership is all about self-belief. He says: 'It's the nature-nurture debate. My feelings are this: there is always going to be some kind of genetic element. However I believe that any person can learn anything and become anything. So I think leaders are 20 per cent born and 80 per cent developed'.

Puccio agrees and cites evidence from the work of social scientist Kotter who observed that historically, people regarded leadership as a gift granted to the rare few, but that today it is widely accepted that leadership skills can be taught and developed. Kotter went on to identify five specific skills that when developed, enhanced leadership effectiveness. These skills are found in the third column of table 2. Kotter's five skills bear a striking similarity to qualities associated with creative people. Since Kotter suggests these skills can be developed, and because these skills relate directly to creativity, it would seem that creativity training can make a positive contribution to leadership development.

Both Puccio and Chisholm agree that that creativity, and specifically creative problem solving, are trainable skills. There is evidence to support their beliefs; more than seventy studies that have documented creativity training is effective. Scientists have found it can impact attitude, creative behaviour within a company and employee performance.

Puccio points to a renowned study conducted between 1967 and 1972. Undergraduate students were split into a control group and an experimental group.The experimental group got creativity training, the control group didn't and there were a battery of tests they did and afterwards they found that the experimental group significantly out-performed the control group.

Creative training

With rising importance being attached to creative leadership, a training and consultancy industry has sprung up in the wake of companies, especially in the public sector, calling for specific guidance.

'There is a place for everything, but I think a lot of these "let's build a giant cube"-type experiential learning trips are very expensive - maybe £5,000 a head - and while I'm sure they will be learning, having an expensive environment isn't everything. A lot of companies are missing the point. Creativity isn't about bonding at all.' Instead Chisholm focuses on neurolinguistic programming and using any conflicts within a team to create positive creative leadership and teamwork.

Companies also tend to buy profiling tools that provide measurable results and are based on research, but Chisholm is sceptical, pointing out: 'They're good bits of academic work and they're highly saleable, but it doesn't develop anyone, it doesn't build any morale, you didn't develop any relationships, you didn't inspire anyone with them'.

Chisholm concludes that while there may be initial resistance, people generally enjoy the benefits of creative leadership pretty quickly. 'On an individual level, yes, creative leaders have got to have self-belief, but leadership itself is about people. Individuals who risk innovation - and it really is the sense of, we're going to try something really weird and wacky - can find that if you even step even slightly outside of the norm, people are going to think you're weird and poke fun at you. So innovation is always a risk, and you might bring the product out to market and people just laugh. So companies with creative leaders take risks, but if you don't take the risks you never get the innovation, and for me that's what creativity is'.

One of the major ways that attitudes to creative leadership have changed is that where creativity was thought only as coming up with ideas - brainstorming - as though this in itself would solve your problem. There is now greater recognition that in order to be effective, leaders must link creative idea forming with effective action and focus on bringing out creative qualities in those around them, linking it inextricably with quality. The future will surely see both quality management and creative leadership ebbing closer together and, hopefully, all without a group hug in sight.