Be the Best

Michael Jenkins, Managing Director of the Centre for Creative Learning, demonstrates how creative leadership can empower employees on every level.

The actual term creative leadership was first coined about 35 years ago to explain the process whereby companies with management issues or business challenges try to first of all understand the problems they have, internalize those problems and then figure out a way to deal with them.

Management and leadership do intersect, but a manager isn’t necessarily a leader and a leader isn’t necessarily a manager. A variety of psychological instruments can be used to help firms assess their employees and design an effective program to improve people’s leadership skills on an individual basis. That improvement then acts as a lever to enable the individual to solve the business and management problems a company has. There is no ‘quick fix’ for developing leaders, it happens over time. This could be the ability to put different lenses on an issue and looking at it from many different angles or thinking laterally and seeing a connection between things which at first night might not be appear to be connected.

In order to reach the next rung, an organization first of all needs to define and compare what it sees as management and what it sees as leadership. At the Centre for Creative Learning (CCL) we define leadership as three key things:

• Establishing a direction. This is creating a vision of the future and coming up with strategies to achieve that vision, which very often has to be done in the midst of a fast moving and changing business environment. In comparison, management is more concerned with planning and budgeting, in other words developing a detailed plan.
• Gaining alignment. This means aligning people so that they understand the direction that has been established and the strategies to achieve that direction. On the management side, this translates into organizing and staffing people by establishing responsibilities and delegating authority to carry out the plan. It’s a more practical task that people would have to deal with within the boundaries of management.
• Motivating people. This involves energizing people and making sure they feel that the tasks they perform and what they achieve as a result will be recognized. On the other hand, the sister function to motivating and inspiring people in a management sense would be controlling problem solving: making detailed plans, anticipating possible obstacles and developing ways to get past them.

Any organization that’s providing leadership training must recognize that the training contribution they make to the organization is a small piece of a much bigger and longer continuum of activities they need to put the individual through. The CCL has put this into a model called ACS: assessment, challenge, support:

• Assessment: First of all you need to know where you stand as an individual regarding your leadership capability. A psychological rating can be done through 360-degree feedback instruments and other tools that assess a person’s strengths and what their development needs are. This is a chance for executives to get a report on their performance as a leader from a composite of different opinions (i.e. feedback from their boss and peers). This gives them the chance to shine a spotlight on key skill areas perceived by colleagues as weak.
• Challenge: The person supervising leadership development needs to embark on a set of challenges that deliberately stretches people and puts them in situations where they are outside their comfort zone. This could mean giving them tasks in an emerging market where the skills that they have acquired so far are tested to the limit. The thinking behind putting people into these situations is to see how they develop other skills to adapt to their new environment. It is critical in helping them to develop as leaders.
• Support: This also involves direct reports from a boss or co-workers who know that the individual is going through a development phase. It would be their task to encourage the person, offer advice and give them assurance that even though they’re in this state of ‘dis-equilibrium’, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

When employees feel an organization is paying attention to their own personal development, it results in a tremendous improvement in morale – an established direction and a clearly articulated strategy puts them in a very safe place. If you can achieve this, you can develop a culture within your organization where people are happy to be where they are and go into work each day looking forward to what they are going to achieve, rather than thinking they are just doing something because they need to make money.

At the CEO leadership training level, ROI measurements can be more broad-based rather than specific financial targets, such as improvement in overall organizational morale. This helps the company feel that investing time and money in the development of creativity has a very clear and measurable outcome. Simply putting people through a program without thinking carefully about what you’re trying to achieve may provide employees with an interesting experience but may discourage organizations from continuing the program because they can’t see any tangible benefits.

Creative leadership is an activity rather than a trait. Very often, when people think of leaders they think of individual charismatic figures. They believe that if you can identify a creative individual with your organization the job is done, you simply make everyone else follow them. But leadership and creativity should be something that everyone can aspire to, at any level – it isn’t an exclusive club.