Investing in Creative Leadership is Investing in Your Company’s Future

Building trust is at the heart of building productive and successful teams

Ray Crowell, SCADpro Fund managing director

“Uniting artistic and entrepreneurial visions unlocks a powerful potential for responding to community needs in unexpected, creative ways.” Yo-Yo Ma, Cellist

At this intersection of art and entrepreneurship, creative leaders emerge. They have many faces. In Great Minds Don’t Think Alike, the authors share how art and design has influenced visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, George Washington Carver, Heddy Lamarr, and Steve Jobs to “anticipate and catalyze dramatic shifts in human endeavors over the centuries.”

We mostly associate the outcomes of the work of these visionaries as innovation. If innovation is the engine of transformation, then creativity is the fuel. By creativity I mean, the ability to see opportunity from which others neglect.

In a recent Deloitte Insights article, Punit Renjen highlights, “resilient leaders know that responding to disruption with agility is about more than survival. It’s about uncovering value.” And the most innovative leaders depend on the often hidden heroes, we call Creative Leaders in Business, to deliver on this burning imperative. As Keith Johnston, SCAD alum and Vice President and Group Research Director at Forrester, observed: “creative leaders can make those leaps because they have the imagination to see things that others don’t.”

One of our generation’s most successful Creative Leaders in Business is Ivy Ross, Vice President, Design for Hardware Products at Google. Ross has been managing teams of designers and design organizations for nearly four decades. She is known for thinking creatively about the elements that allow individuals to do their best work — she refers to herself as a “builder,” not just of products and services but of teams and organizations. Reflecting on the conditions in which she was most creative, she shared that in her mid-20’s , after having her own success , she realized the joy she got from helping other designers achieve their creative potential. Her efforts at Mattel and now Google illustrate how Ross is continually refining and reinventing design.

In 2003, as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Girls Design and Development at Mattel, Ross led an organization of 250-plus designers, engineers, product developers and others. Given the success of the Barbie and Ken franchise, much of the team’s time and energy was focused “on the realities of the business … we weren’t devoting enough time to the possibilities.” Ross piloted at first secretly and was then given permission to take 12 individuals out of the business, sequester them for 12 weeks, in an effort to generate completely new product/brand possibilities for the company. Ross’ experiment, called Project Platypus, was wildly successful, generating new products that won parenting awards that resulted in some new franchises for Mattel and earned Ross the Chairman’s award. To achieve these breakthroughs, Platypus took a very different approach that made participants not just nervous, but as Ross described it, on the verge of panicking at times. Ross says, “If you get people to trust, connect, and understand their individual talents first, working together is going to be that much more powerful. Once trust is developed, collective curiosity soars.”

Michael Gough, SCAD honorary doctorate recipient and Vice President, Product Design at Uber, acknowledged that developing high-performing teams whose skills are aligned with KPIs can take time. “At Adobe, it took seven years just to gain the level of trust that allowed us to work on the Creative Cloud … but we built one of the strongest and most impactful design organizations out there,” generating, among other things, a significant new line of business and a tremendous growth engine for Adobe.

In turbulent times, the ability to deliver on the promise of innovation, in an “experiential sea of sameness,” becomes even more important. Corporations must groom the next generation of Creative Leaders in Business through art, design and entrepreneurship, galvanizing their curiosity and imagination through immersive experiences constructed to cultivate creative confidence and naive optimism.

Creative Leaders in Business by Design

As contemporary consumers go about their daily lives, they largely ignore the products, services, and interactions they experience due to a phenomenon that industry insiders call an “experiential sea of sameness.”

Yet every so often, something will break through the clutter of the ordinary and pique attention — a product, service, website, package, brand, or experience, with a novel or extraordinary aspect that has been deliberately conceived, designed, and executed. Of course, design cuts both ways — for every well-designed product, service, or experience, there are many more instances that are either insignificant, forgettable, or poorly designed.

While design has always been fundamental to the human experience, the success of design-led companies like Apple have inspired a new appreciation of its significance. Designers credited with some of the most iconic products, like Jony Ive of Apple, have achieved celebrity status. Their ability to create products and services that are exceptional in form and function have reshaped entire industries.

“Steve Jobs spoke often about how studying calligraphy taught him the importance of design, a hallmark of Apple. He recognized from the start that personal technology products benefit from being human-centered and beautiful. Jobs was early in the list of artist-founders of transformative companies including AirBnB, Crowdrise, Kickstarter, and Etsy.” — Great Minds Don’t Think Alike

Most innovative, well-designed products and experiences are designed by groups of creative individuals collaborating as a team. These teams are dedicated to iterating, refining, and eventually producing products that are functional as well as beautiful. Occasionally these products are of such quality that they are elevated to iconicity.

Ross notes, “While the consumer knows what they know today, designers can take them to a place they couldn’t have imagined.”

That presumes, of course, that designers have the time and luxury to think creatively, without being constrained or limited by the day-to-day demands of making incremental improvements to existing products and services.

While many executives deeply understand business and a subset stand out as exceptional leaders, very few combine all three of these skill sets: creativity, leadership, and business. These are the special freaks who, to borrow a phrase from Chris Brogan, understand “business is about belonging.”

“Belonging is about finding that place where you finally let out a deep breath you had no idea you were holding and feeling with great certainty that the people around you understand you.” — Chris Brogan

In Adam Grant’s Originals, he highlights conformity and originality as the two routes to achievement. He goes on to define each, “Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.”

After careful examination of the nature of creativity, transformational leadership, and the core of business acumen, we concluded Creative Leadership in Business centers on the ability of an individual to turn imaginative original ideas into reality that builds on several underlying abilities, including the ability to perceive things differently, uncover hidden patterns, and connect seemingly unrelated phenomena towards scalable market opportunities.

The most adept Creative Leaders in Business use visualization, storytelling, and virtualization to convey and help peers understand proposed strategic solutions, enabling executives and their organizations to comprehend, assess, and ultimately buy into proposed strategies.

We surveyed a cross-section of executives, managers, and employees in mid- and large-size businesses. When asked if they have ever worked in an organization, department, or on a team led by a Creative Leader in Business, respondents corroborated our hypothesis.

• 51% say they have never worked in an organization, department, or on a team led by a Creative Leader in Business.
• 1 in 5 report that they currently work or have previously worked for a company led by a CEO they regard as a Creative Leader in Business.
• 1 in 8 either currently work or have previously worked in an organization led by a C-level executive (e.g., CMO, CIO, COO, etc.) they regard as a Creative Leader in Business.

Respondents who have worked with a Creative Leader in Business were asked to select the characteristics that distinguish that individual from other leaders. More than half cited the creative leadership skills shown below.

Creative Leaders in Business wear multiple hats. In addition to managing their organizations and overseeing people, projects, and deliverables, they are the liaison between design, marketing, engineering, and other parts of the organization. In an equally important role, they guide, improve, and reinvent the process of design, creating conditions that enable individuals to come together as a team and co-create prolifically. Much as they continually seek to improve the company’s products and services, Creative Leaders in Business also look for ways to improve how their organization develops solutions.

Given his focus on strategic opportunities, Michael Gough emphasizes the importance of bringing together individuals with the right skills. As he observes, “the quality of interactions with our mobile app really isn’t the key determinant of our success. And so, what is? And what kind of a team do we need and what kind of focus do we need, if we’re going to attack the problems that actually do matter to our customers?” In his experience, “getting your house in order” is a difficult but necessary first step and often requires replacing team members whose skills are not up to the task of solving seemingly intractable issues.

Over the course of their careers, Creative Leaders in Business have demonstrated their ability to drive business results with creative solutions to vexing challenges. Trained in creative disciplines and problem solving, Creative Leaders in Business have honed their business and leadership skills “on the job,” often taking on challenges in disparate industries. Much like their counterparts in fashion and entertainment, Creative Leaders in Business are making their mark in tech, services, and other businesses where competition is intense and customers are demanding — and industry observers and boards are taking notice.

How Might You Invest in Your Future?

Fluent imaginative ideators and original agile designers, with sophisticated intuition and both critical and adaptive thinking skills, will emerge and lead organizations through the most turbulent of times. You want them to be in your organization, and here’s how.

Examine beliefs and disbeliefs, foster creative construction, and cultivate unique power skills across these seven areas:

1. Applied Imagination and the Risks of Curiosity

2. Perspective Shapes the New Reality

3. Growth Mindfulness and Mindsets

4. Adaptive Thinking for High Performance

5. Generative Improvisation for Organizational Agility

6. Navigate Ambiguity by Letting Go

7. Continuous Agility through Understanding the Edges

Transformation entails risk, but creative leaders in business also recognize the risks associated with maintaining the status quo, which are sometimes more difficult to recognize until it’s too late. They have learned the importance of ensuring senior leaders and the entire organization understand and buy into innovative new strategies and solutions.

Albert Einstein once said “imagination is more valuable than knowledge.” Given the unclear long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling innovation with creative leadership will be even more critical in the months and years ahead. Invest wisely.