The Other Cross-Cultural Leadership

The following is adapted from remarks given at the August graduation of the 2014 Executive MBA class of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership. 

One of the great assets of any global academic or training program is the national, regional, social or economic diversity of its participants.  In its still relatively young EMBA program alone, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership has enrolled participants from over 50 countries.  At the most basic level, that diversity helps individuals to expand their individual networks and to join (or deepen their place in) a global community of creative professionals.  Another positive outcome is the enrichment of the learning of individuals from different markets around the world through the sharing of experiences, insights and challenges.  More specific to the creative communication industries, which are undergoing extraordinary transformation, diversity among participants enables greater access to specific tools and strategies for navigating changing technologies, customer and client relationships, and business models. 

Facilitating the exchange of experiences and fostering the professional relationships among participants is a key responsibility of executive programs.  Ordinarily, this includes teaching major approaches to ‘cross-cultural leadership’ as part of the EMBA curriculum.  The research, tools and models for understanding conventional national and cultural differences remain vitally important to the success of creative leaders.  Many of these are more widely familiar:

• High- and low-context communications, anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s classical approach to understanding how much or little implicit knowledge is required in different cultures to communicate information effectively.
• Key dimensions to cultural interactions, identified through longstanding research by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede, and including Individualism/Collectivism, Feminine/Masculine, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Indulgence/Restraint, and Long Term/ Short Term Orientation. (Fons Trompenaar’s succeeding model of national culture has seven related dimensions as well as five orientations for the ways in which people dal with each other.)
• Richard D. Lewis, the founder of the Berlitz language schools in East Asia, Finland and Portugal, whose model focuses, in simple terms, on whether those in given countries or regions pursue individual tasks using linear or sequential logic, focus on relationships and pursue multiple tasks simultaneously, or follow strategies that seek solidarity and harmony.
• Perhaps most ambitiously, the GLOBE project conceived by Wharton professor Robert J. House (and building on Hofstede’s model), offers both an inventory of nine cultural competencies and six specific leadership competencies that vary across ten societal clusters.  These include charismatic vs value-based, team orientation, and participative leadership.

Taken together, these approaches convey the complexity and richness of communication, interaction, and, especially, leadership in a world still demanding of profound sensitivity in thought and action to social, cultural and national differences – that is, to an early twenty-first century world that is anything but flat. 

Yet another aspect of diversity among creative professionals is not so often addressed: the diversity of roles and professions among those who increasingly are drawn together to collaborate.  In the traditional creative industries, for example, everyone does not have the word ‘creative’ in their title.  Amir Kassei, the Global Chief Creative Officer of DDB, the advertising agency, uses the helpful label ‘creatively minded’ to include those without other formal validation but who still contribute to creative activities.  Australian researchers Peter Higgs and Stuart Cunningham advanced the idea of a ‘creative trident’ several years ago, breaking out employment in creative versus support activities in creative industries as well as creative occupations in other industries.  In their recently published collection, Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries (Edward Elgar 2014), Greg Hearn, Ruth Bridgestock, Ben Goldsmith, and Jess Rodgers argue for greater attention to the third group of workers employed in creative occupations or contributing creative services outside the traditional creative industries.

In a world where cross-functional and interdisciplinary teams are not only increasingly the norm but looked to as a source, in their very diversity of perspectives and experiences, of original thinking and innovative work, the challenge for leaders is to recognize and yoke together such differences successfully.  Just as leaders need to mindful, attentive and sensitive to the different communication and leadership expectations and norms existing across geographic borders, in other words, so they should be attuned to the attitudes, perspectives, and expectations about working together brought by different kinds of creative professionals and practitioners.  Just as Brazilians are sensitive and adapt to different ways of working together with those in Singapore, to take on example, writers need to be sensitive and adapt to the different ways of working productively with programmers.

Effectively combining differing technical expertise, aesthetic preferences, and mental models has long been at the heart of creative business.  The tension – for some, a paradox – between the chaos of creativity and the order of business or management has not only been a challenge to be overcome but a source of the ‘creative friction’ (to use Michael Eisner’s words) needed to generate fresh ideas.  A ready historical example, drawn from the ‘creative revolution’ of the 1960s in the advertising industry (as well as others), involved surmounting the ‘great wall’ between creatives and suits without losing entirely the productive opposition it represented.

A similar struggle with the tensions arising from teaming those with different professional or aesthetic languages, perspectives and expertise has also long existed among creatives themselves.  As eager as were the first adopters of Bill Bernbach’s revolutionary coupling of art and copy, finding success in work together wasn’t easy or straightforward.  The very first team of art director and copywriter, the legendary Bob Gage and Phyllis Robinson, whom Bernbach took with him from Grey Advertising when DDB was founded, were enthusiastic about the new model but often struggled with its implementation.  As committed as the two were, their interactions, which were meant to be shaped by constructive conflict, were often bruising.  But they ended up producing exceptional and, often, timeless work.

To extend that example to the present, many are calling for an expansion or other re-constitution of the core teams in advertising.  For some, it should be ‘art, copy and code.’  For nearly all, there is a reckoning that some version of an interdisciplinary, cross-functional or hybrid team adds value through its combination of multiple points of view, beliefs, and experiences.  Copywriting, design, digital, and production, even planning and strategy are among the familiar roles typically mixed and combined in hopes of generating the best creative outcomes.

Looking beyond marketing services or brand communications, the value of recognizing different skills, experiences, and mental models appears in even sharper relief.  Contemporary design and architecture firms, for example, regularly integrate a wide range of experts to help shape their work.  At IDEO, cultural anthropologists observe human behavior, kinesiologists study bodily movement, mechanical engineers contribute to the exploration of how physical solutions might be crafted.  Foster & Partners, one of the world’s most renowned architecture firms, likewise employs a full array of professions, including acoustics specialists, aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, and visual or plastic artists.  

Of course, there is a crucial balance to be struck here – and also a risk to be acknowledged and averted.  Even as we identify individuals as belonging to certain groups or professional cultures in order to be more sensitive to their needs and wants and well-being, we take the risk of viewing them one-dimensionally, simplistically.  The writers do this and the digital guys do that.  Even with the best of intentions, we may reinforce or fetishize categories of professional work or culture out of proportion.  As with national or regional cultures or sub-cultures, we may stereotype unfairly.  Individuals are not simply one thing or, despite a professional skillset or mindset or pedigree, alike in many ways.

Put differently, it is not only a matter of recognizing and coordinating different skills or knowledge or perspectives in developing creative solutions to business challenges.  Rather, the deeper task and responsibility of leadership is to understand that individuals with apparently different professional skills or technical expertise have often developed through very different experiences.  Their conceptions of what teamwork is, what successful outcomes or IP rights should be, how creativity relates to business, indeed their beliefs about and attitudes toward authority and the free market and are all also potentially distinctive.  Ultimately, the mental models and what management scholar Tarun Khanna calls the ‘contextual intelligence’ of those approaching creative work from different professional perspectives warrants closer and sustained engagement by leaders.

That is the basis of the other cross-cultural leadership.  The cultures and sub-cultures – that is, the shared attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and values but also common actions – of different kinds of creative workers deserve more attention.  The more leaders recognize and remain mindful of those differences, and of the multiple creative contexts brought to bear by their increasingly varied creative talent, the better they will be able to guide and enable the rich diversity of teams and organizations toward accomplishing shared goals together.

The challenges faced by leaders of creative teams and organizations only continue to increase as markets grow more complex, traditional relationships are transformed, and the skills of workers become more varied.  Everyone brings distinct tools, skills and knowledge, often from across disciplines and functions, which need to be integrated in working together on a task or project.  But perhaps even more importantly, everyone also brings different expectations, mental models, and solving problems together.

Among the guiding tenets of effective creative leadership today are ongoing self-reflection and self-understanding and the central importance of forging a vision and purpose around which creative teams and businesses can rally and work.  Increasingly, as leaders bring together disciplines, functions and technologies to generate better and better creative solutions for clients and customers, those leaders also need to be more attentive and adaptive not merely to the skills brought by diverse creative workers but their different beliefs, intelligences, and ways of working.

Such attentiveness and adaptability has the makings of a new alliance or social contract between creative talent with different attitudes, experiences, and expectations.  It also presents an immense opportunity for creative leaders willing to understand and engage more fully the many distinct creative cultures represented in their teams and organizations. 

The Rise of the Creative Leader

To speak of a creative leader, or manager, is for some a paradox: creativity is chaotic and unrestrained while leadership is orderly and controlling, and setting the two together makes for an uneasy, potentially volatile combination.

It was not always thus. A century ago, as businessmen entered the twentieth century seeking to differentiate themselves by building modern enterprises, the most respected outcomes of creative thinking and problem-solving took the form of order and process. The giants of the age were Henry Ford, whose automobile assembly line had revolutionized manufacturing production by changing and regimenting human behaviors, and Thomas Edison, a tireless inventor who sought constantly to make his process of experimentation and invention more systematic.

The evolution since has been fitful, swinging between the exigencies of commerce, with its demands for planning and predictability, and the realities of art, or creative production, with its requisite freedom and openness to exploration. The 1960s were particularly compelling years for this antithesis. The Romantic legacy of creativity as authentic self-expression, being true to oneself and one’s vision of the world, contrasted sharply with the rigidity of social conventions and corporate constraints. Opening a fictional window on this golden age of American advertising, the AMC television drama Mad Men has shown how that contrast led to the setting apart of creativity in its own departments, appreciated but anomalous, a necessary function of business to be tolerated and closely supervised.

Rightly admired for its historical accuracy, the series’ repeated celebration of the effectiveness of creative advertising also casts light on the apparently contradictory nature of real-life business creativity during the era. Business does not succeed in spite of creativity and free-spirited creative individuals but rather thrives because of their imaginative work. As a result, it would seem, successful leaders of creative enterprises may be less chaperones and disciplinarians than coaches and co-conspirators in their shared endeavors. Looking back at actual advertising agencies of the time, like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in the US with its pioneering teams combining art directors and copywriters, reveals the reality of such a shared sense of creative possibility.

The last two decades have seen nearly all businesses embrace innovation and creativity as central missions, at least at a high level, with leaders expected to serve as imaginative guides. Designated ‘creatives’ still do essential work in brand communications (or marketing services) industries like advertising and beyond, say, in the design areas of manufacturing firms. But more and more, creative production and excellence have become collective affairs with attention to the effectiveness of collaboration throughout businesses. For many, an equally dramatic realization has been that the most far-reaching instances of creativity involve organizational or process innovations rather than more obvious new product or service offerings. Hearkening back to Ford’s assembly line or DDB’s restructuring of traditional agency teams, these changes attest to the value and reach of leaders capable of the implementation of original thinking.

Technology-driven industries have been especially important to shaping this recent change in thinking about business creativity and many leadership icons of our time – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma – have worked there. Yet creative leadership today is not simply about technological wizardry. At Apple, Jobs’ creative genius was to envision and market new horizons for emerging technologies and existing industries alike (going back to the company’s beginning, his skills were complemented by co-founder Steve Wozniak’s technical abilities in programming). The reverberations of new media and technology firms have been profound: the emergent approach to creative leadership often combines the Silicon Valley start-up ethos, traditional creative industry openness to expressiveness and exploration, design thinking, and the sheer need of all businesses to become more innovative to remain competitive and serve customers better.

The terms, leadership and management, of course are not entirely interchangeable. There are many distinctions drawn between the two, both functional (e.g., the manager administers what is; the leader innovates what will be) and cultural (Americans like to speak of leadership, Brits and other prefer management). One of the best-known is that managers focus on systems and structures while leaders focus on people. That particular distinction made good sense in the industrial era, when both managers and leaders were crucial, respectively, to organizing work and workers efficiently and to ensuring that the firm was effective, that is, competitive in the marketplace. However, in the 1990s, legendary management consultant and educator Peter Drucker recognized that such lines were increasingly blurring and less helpful in the information economy, in which the overriding task is to “make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.” Today, we might fairly extend Drucker’s insight to our own economy in which creativity is the new normal for businesses.

Understandings of creative productions and industries themselves have likewise changed dramatically during this time. The groundbreaking classification and mapping of the creative industries by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport first launched in 1997 has ushered in far-reaching reassessments of the status of creative activities, work and organizations around the world. While having the result of raising the profile of creative activities, such attention has been criticized by some for reducing the value of those activities to the purely economic. Richard Florida’s influential The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) claimed with comparable reach that the presence and work of creative talent could foster openness and ultimately attract business and capital to post-industrial cities. Even as the stakes of leadership in such scenarios grow far beyond individual firms or agencies, the core relationships between individuals with creative skills and talents and those seeking to marshal and direct them and their activities appear to become less oppositional and more fluid.

If creative leadership can no longer be readily understood through the tension between order and chaos, commerce and self-expression, what should be our orientation for its future? Returning to the words “creative” and “leadership” themselves, freighted as they are with history, offers some guidance. Together, they suggest bringing novel thinking to complex leadership challenges and at the same time deploying strategic prioritizing and decision-making to creative opportunities. Rather than antitheses, the words can convey a necessary balance and even symbiosis that support a sustainably successful creative business. No creative leader could ask for more.

This piece was originally written for House Magazine and also appears as a "Berlin Brief" on the Berlin School of Creative Leadership website.