The Creative Leader

Last fall at a professional conference I led a workshop called The Creative Leader. I've repeated the same workshop with other groups since then and I've been intrigued by some of the insights and comments that have come my way in each of them.

The first insight happened when I heard myself saying to the first group that I had just realized that the title "Creative Leader" was redundant. It's not possible to be an effective leader if you don't exercise creativity of some sort. I suspect most of the people in that session either considered themselves leaders or someone else did and yet less than half of them raised their hands when I asked if they thought they were creative. Again and again, I realize how limited and limiting our ideas about creativity are. We rarely hear leadership talked about as a creative act, let alone a creative art and yet we consider vision a key leadership skill. Isn't vision the ability to imagine something different, a new product, a new process, a new something? Leaders are supposed to help us solve our problems and to do that, they have to be able to think of different ways of being, interacting, of working on the issue at hand. Yet, again, we rarely credit that as creativity.

Leadership and creativity go hand-in-hand. We shortchange ourselves and the people with whom we interact when we don't acknowledge acts of creativity. Denying our own creativity, we don't recognize it, let alone encourage it, in others. As a result we miss opportunities to make positive change, to develop healthy work places, to make our work more enjoyable, the list goes on and on.

Where have you seen creative leadership? What supports or hinders your ability to be creative in your work (paid or otherwise.)? Any chance it's just your definition that's getting in your way? I'm curious to hear your insights and comments. Next time I'll share some more of mine.

Best wishes,

Gage

A Moment of Reflection

Unfortunately, too often it’s the people’s failures that get them to reflect on their experiences. When you’re going along and everything is working well, you don’t sit down and reflect. Which is exactly the moment when you should do it.” ~ Warren Bennis quoting Barbara Corday

Here's a simple quick way to add some times of reflection into your day.

First, grab a sheet of paper and a pen and place them both next to your keyboard.

Next, pick one meeting or conversation that you had today. It could be a meeting that went well or one that was difficult. Your choice, and there is no right or wrong. Just grab the first one that came to mind when you read the first sentence of this paragraph.

As you read this sentence, take a deep breath and then let it out slowly. I’m willing to bet that, whether you intended it or not, just reading that sentence helped your breathing change. Try it one more time – deep breath in and deep breath out.

Now, pick up your pen and on your sheet of paper answer these two questions about the meeting or conversation you selected. (And yes, I really mean write it down. The act of writing helps focus our thoughts and helps us articulate those thoughts more fully. Then our ideas are captured and we remember them more accurately.)

1) What’s one thing I learned from this meeting/conversation?

2) What’s one question I still have?

Simple, isn't it? Reflection is an important leadership task that we make harder than it actually is. Try this every day for the week and at the end of the week spend just a bit longer and see what you have learned. I promise - it's worth the effort.

Best of luck,

Gage

Control Issues

"The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses." Napoleon Hill

Here’s what I’ve learned from competitive ballroom dancing – winning is not in my control. I can practice my feet off, dance my best dance ever and still not earn a first place. Maybe there was somebody on the floor who is a better dancer than I am. Maybe there was a dancer there at my level who danced her best dance ever! Maybe the judges were watching when I made my only mistake of the entire heat. Whatever the reason, a hard reality of competition is that the result is not in my control.

However, there are many things in my control and they all start with my attitude. I can choose to do my very best at every practice session or I can coast through because I’m kinda tired that day. I can choose to work on the tiniest little details that most people never see because I know that every detail adds to the final package or I can be lazy about those ‘picky’ bits. I can walk out onto the dance floor with confidence – even if I know my knees are shaking. When I compete with some of the best dancers in the state, I can let that fact intimidate me or push me to show I deserve to be there as well. Those things are completely up to me.

My experience tells me that if I pick the hard work choice, the attention to detail choice, the positive attitude choice, the result is better every time. Not that I’ll win every time, but I know that whatever the final result, I’m happier with the experience. I’ve had more fun because I danced as well as I could. I also know that over time, I’ve won more heats with that attitude than with the negative one. So if I bring the right attitude with me, over time the win/loss record takes care of itself.

The same is true in leadership. I can’t always control the resources nor can I control the results every time. But I can always choose how I approach a situation. I can pay attention to the details no one else notices and appreciate those who are managing those details well or I can ignore them. I can choose to do my best work and design situations so staff members have a chance to do their best work. I can support creativity or squelch it and then wonder why no one tries anything new.

As in competitive dancing, or any sort of work really, the end result is not entirely in my control. There are many situations and people who can get in the way (literally on the dance floor) of a ‘win’. But my attitude and my effort, my attention and my appreciation for work well done, these and more are in my control. Experience tells me in my leadership work as in my dancing, that when I choose the positive side of the equation, I’m happier with the experience whatever the details of the result.
All the best,

Gage

Ideas and Actions

“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” Joel Barker

In the latest edition of the UTSA Student Affairs staff newsletter, I wrote about a woman who made a very large gift to the university to fund scholarships. Years earlier, she had heard students discussing the difficulties of paying for college. What makes her different from so many of us is that instead of ignoring what she heard, instead of feeling sorry for the students, instead of wishing the world was otherwise, she did something to make a difference. She started a scholarship fund with a small donation and she kept adding to it throughout her life, finally ending with a multi-million dollar bequest. She saw a need and took action.

She saw a need and took action. I don’t think this characteristic by itself defines a leader, but I’m beginning to wonder if it is possible for leadership to exist without it. Last week I wondered if the term ‘creative leader’ was redundant, since leaders have to be able to see new possibilities, new ways of doing, new ways of being and that seems to be the very definition of creativity. Here is the definition from dictionary.com “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination”. I still think creative leader is redundant, but it’s not enough. Having a new idea is fantastic, seeing a new way to meet a need is wonderful, but without the next step of ‘taking action’, there’s not much leadership in evidence. While lead is not always a verb, in this context, lead is an action word. A person has to be moving us forward in one sense or another for us to consider it leadership. It may be from one state of being to another, but I think change is required.

And, as I’ve said before, there have to be other people involved. If I walk out of the room saying ‘Follow me’ and everyone stays in their chairs, there is not a whole lot of leading going on!

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending TEDx San Antonio* and I listened to more than a dozen people who exemplified leadership. Their initiatives ranged from addressing hunger to ending the death penalty, from fostering creativity in children to helping people who are paralyzed walk – they covered a very wide range of issues and ideas. All of them have their own style, their own focus, their own way of thinking about issues, but all of them have these characteristics:

^They pay attention to the world around them.
^They see a need and believe they can make a difference.
^They find others who know about and care about this need they have identified.
^They are willing and eager to learn.
^They are able to step out on their own if need be, but able and willing to connect with others.
^They envision a world that is different from and better than the one that currently exists.
^They take action.

If the quote above is right, these folks are going to change the world by changing their part of it – sounds like leadership to me.

Best wishes,

Gage

*http://www.tedxsanantonio.com/

Leading from the Middle -Part 2 - The Butterfly Effect

I’m often intrigued by the idea of weather, imagining what it must have been like before radar and satellites. Now, we watch hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and we can follow their route across the Atlantic to our front door off the Gulf of Mexico. As we see the storms move into the Midwest, we have at least a marginal understanding of where our weather comes from. But 100 years ago, probably even less, the storms had no such history. Probably a weather-knowledgeable person understood that the changes in humidity or the clouds heralded a storm in the near future, but I doubt many people thought of the storm starting in Africa.

We now have some understanding of the way in which something as far away as Africa can have an impact on us. We act as if we understand it when we toss around the phrase ‘the butterfly effect’ as a shorthand way to express the idea that a small change on the other side of the world can impact our lives. But I wonder how often we bring that concept into our day-to-day lives of our organizations. I’m not sure we think about it very often and, I suspect, we consciously act on it even more rarely. Within our organizations, little behaviors and actions can have as much impact as the major policies and those little behaviors and actions come from each one of us.

In her book, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, author Margaret Wheatley writes about this idea saying that organizations have self-similar behaviors that are exhibited by all of the people in an organization no matter what their position or work might be.

“These recurring patterns of behavior are what many call the culture of the organization…. By observing the behavior of a production floor employee or a senior executive you can tell what the organizations values and how it chooses to do its work. You hear the values referred to even in causal conversation…. [This similarity] is achieved not through compliance to an exhausting set of standards and rules, but from a few simple principles that everyone is accountable for, operating in a condition of individual freedom.”

If it is this repetition of behaviors that creates the culture of the organization, then the way to change the culture is to start changing behaviors. At various times in different organizations, I’ve worked with staff members to find ways to improve the way we work together. After working at it awhile and seeing some change, people begin to like it and wish the entire organization was working on the same challenges. My response to them is always the same, we can only work on our own behavior and interactions, but I believe that the changes we make, if they are good ones, will begin to exert influence beyond our part of the organization. And I’ve found that to be true. So if you think your organizational culture is negative, first look at what you’re doing to support that negativity and stop doing it. Second, identify more positive behaviors you can begin to exhibit, start doing those and watch what happens. It may take a while, but don’t get discouraged. If that little butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong can start a tropical storm in Africa that then dumps rain on Texas, surely we can have an impact on the organizations we lead.

Good luck,

Gage