A Resolution for Creative Leaders in 2013: Give Up Power and Cede Control...to Create More Value

‘Tis the season of making resolutions for the new year.  Of looking back at what has been been and looking ahead to what can be.  It’s a season of future possibilities grounded in the hard work, the successes and the failures, of the past twelve months.

One of the core tenets of creative leadership is reflection – consistent, constructive, courageous reflection about our individual values and beliefs and the actions they guide.  Reflection serves as a crucial basis for understanding ourselves as well as our actions as leaders.  Reflection and the self-knowledge it generates also shapes our decisions about the future.   We pause to reflect on the “why” of our busy lives in order to decide on “what” to do next and “how” effectively to take that action.

This dynamic of reflection enabling us to align our beliefs and actions as creative leaders makes looking forward to the arrival of a new year filled with possibilities so exciting.

Yet as we approach the new year, my wish is for you to consider taking an especially challenging action.  Most of us will make lists of resolutions for the months to come.  We’ll design ambitious goals and then dedicate ourselves to achieving them.  Some of these may involve committing to more regular practice of reflection on our days, perhaps meditation, and to stay grounded by integrating different areas of our lives.

More likely, though, the majority of our professional goals for the new year will involve re-focusing our time, attention and energies with our clients or customers, associates and colleagues.  We’ll dedicate ourselves to new projects.  We’ll re-double our efforts on existing ones.  We’ll pledge to be more effective leaders of people, teams and organizations.  All noble and worthwhile aspirations, but our way to reach those goals will typically be by taking on more responsibilities and assuming more control ourselves.  Ultimately, many of our resolutions will translate into accruing more power.

Instead of resolving to gather more power, let me offer an alternative approach to your 2013: Consider how to give up more power.  To cede more control.  To share more responsibility.  Ask yourself, how will you build more trust in your core team next year so you can collaborate with rather than control them?  How will you move beyond providing direct inspiration to fostering an individual sense of aspiration in each of those around you?  Ultimately, how will you stir the passions of those with whom you work in order to be more innovative together?

These are hard questions.  For power and control in many organizations means final decision-making authority or profit and loss responsibility or supervision over people or departments.  It’s very difficult giving up those hard-won markers of success – they’re typically our rewards for, and outward signs of, our achievements, after all.

Yet by giving up tight-fisted individual control, we allow for an increased sense of shared ownership that translates, ultimately, into the creation of greater value.  You may recognize such thinking from the recent work of Tim Leberecht, Charlene Li, Nilofer Merchant, among others (and yes, I recommend their work for your 2013 reading lists…).  However, creative leaders have long understood that fostering creative excellence requires purposeful openness and genuine trust to draw fully on all the passion and capabilities of those with whom we work.  The challenge is to reflect on that understanding for our own lives as leaders and to act.

So, Happy New Year.  And all good wishes for your giving up power and control for a more creative and successful 2013.

Nurturing Rebels and Unlocking Innovation: The Creative Turn in Business and Leadership

The CMO of frog, Tim Leberecht, recently wrote, "How to Nurture Your Company's Rebels, And Unlock Their Innovative Might" http://bit.ly/Uz6btM (the same piece appeared at FastCo. Design). Despite its brevity, the post gathers a range of examples and sources, from innovation communes and Ashoka Changemakers to Roger Martin and U2, of a telling shift underway today to embrace oppositional thinking in business. Both in cultivating internal opposition to enhance innovative outputs and in driving a more fundamental resistance to business as usual across industries, leaders and organizations are increasingly supporting varied creative processes that seek to disrupt the status quo.

For those in the creative or some R&D-intensive industries, especially, this approach and attitude to gaining competitive advantage may not seem new. But there are at least a couple significant developments in play here.  The first is nothing less than an historical transformation of the status of creativity and innovation in business. That's a far-reaching claim, of course, and one I've developed in my own teaching and consulting on creative leadership (and that Chris Bilton has also made). Essentially, the idea is that the last two to three decades have seen a dramatic reversal of the longstanding containment - or even marginalization - of innovation within organizations whose priority had been increasing efficiency, lean operations, and rational problem-solving. The change in mindset, epitomized by innovators in Silicon Valley and outlined most familiarly in the writings on disruptive innovation by Clayton Christensen, is now embraced across industries and beyond, including the non-profit and public sectors (think "creative cities").

Leberecht's post offers a range of examples of successful contrarian practices, small and large, as noted, and concludes by recommending three possible actions for those wanting to make internal oppositions within their organizations productive.  They are:

1. Create safe spaces
2. Make sure that internal opposition is constant
3. Embrace passive and active opposition 

These are sensible enough, though anyone wanting think more deeply about how to develop and deliver on this capability for this creative internal opposition should read Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind.

As important as is the call for more creative and productive internal opposition, it's a second development that I find potentially even more provocative and consequential. The image introducing Leberecht's post is a Jolly Roger and the spectre of piracy threads through his examples of creative opposition. Yet in celebrating the misfits and the rebels whom organizations and even project teams rely on for daring innovation and value-creating differentiation, the old challenge of successfully containing and incorporating oppositional thinking re-emerges. When Leberecht urges launching the development of creative opposition by asking such questions as, What is your company's black market?, in other words, one can easily extend the answer beyond that which is productive for particular organizations. Consider hacking, for example: while there are now "hackers for good," this has become a safely contained and manageable (and, by some individuals, often profitably self-marketed) subset of a larger category of creative rebels, many of whom are not "good" and indeed have proven themselves menacing.  

This is more than semantics. To think more deeply about disruption or opposition leads to the discussion of how essential creative destruction is to genuine innovation in organizations, industries and markets. Even more, though, to speak of creative leadership or innovation in terms of piracy and rebellion should necessarily take account of the boundaries of those organizations, industries and markets -- and also acknowledge the hackers, pirates, rogue traders, dark pools, black markets and more that exist beyond them. Their global rise over the last two to three decades of technological change and globalization has been every bit as dramatic - and illuminating about the nature of innovation - as that of loyal opposition whose work remains internal to corporations or industries.