After reading this article, you’ll have an understanding about how creative leadership is the leverage you need to succeed.

Another career ago (which translates to early this century, before I worked in the arts sector) I did a brief stint as the Learning and Development Manager at Sheppard Consulting, a management and organisational psychology consultancy. In fact, I credit the charismatic Managing Director Terry Sheppard with setting me on a path to creative freedom and career fulfilment. Let’s start with what he said to me during my interview that really stuck with me.

Besides asking me if I would be willing to remove my nose ring if a client requested it, he recommended I read ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organisation’ by Peter M Senge. Of course, I did read it, and the idea from the book that resonates the most for me, and which forms the basis of the book, is the ‘principle of leverage.’ In a nutshell, it means finding the action that will have the greatest leverage; that will produce the greatest results with the least amount of effort.

In ‘The Creativity Imperative: The Secret of Success for Organisations in the 21st Century‘, my co-author, Ben Marton, and I contend that in order to succeed, organisations needs to be creative. Creativity is absolutely essential for organisations to compete and thrive in a post GFC, rapidly changing, and increasingly complex environment. It is a world driven by globalisation and the shift from the Industrial to the Innovation Age. A world facing a potentially bleak future of finite and dwindling resources.

Which brings me to the focus of this article. How exactly does an organisation, or a community or network, make itself creative? Some say it is culture. Others advocate a focus on the physical environment. I could go on with other examples, but let’s cut to the chase. The leverage point for all this is creative leadership. We need leaders who value creativity, who understand their role in driving creativity within an organisation (or community, network or team), and who empower others to be creative.

Let’s delve into this a bit more, by examining what it means to be a creative leader, who can be one, and how  and how creative leadership brings success. It has been gratifying for me, in digging into the literature on creative leadership, to find that I intuitively demonstrated creativity in my leadership at Move Through Life (MTL), a dance company I founded in 2004 in Adelaide, so I’ll throw in a few examples from my experience at MTL as we go on. While MTL is an artistic organisation, the examples are equally relevant for an organisation of any kind, as I demonstrate in my work with The Dragonfly Solution.

What does it mean to be a creative leader?

Contrary to popular belief, the role of creative leaders is not to be the one that comes up with all the great ideas. Of course, a creative leader will tend to have plenty of ideas of their own, but a creative leader is most effective when they facilitate creativity in others. So creativity is something that creative leaders think about and coordinate, not just what they do. Renowned creativity expert, Ken Robinson, divides this role of creative leaders into three functions (1) facilitating the creative abilities of others, (2) forming and facilitating creative teams, and (3) developing, promoting and supporting a culture of creativity and innovation .

At Move Through Life, I am both the Artistic Director and General Manager. Sometimes I think the title ‘Artistic Director’ is inappropriate, because I don’t really direct, I facilitate. We hold a meeting once a month, with the rather twee name ‘C Club’ (short for choreographic club), where those company members interested in choreography discuss their choreographic ideas, give feedback on work in development, plan the logistics of presenting new work, and develop the future plans of the company. All company members are welcome to be part of C Club, whether they want to actually choreograph or not. C Club members take turns to host the meetings in their own homes, we all bring wine and food, so it seems more like an informal, social gathering than a meeting. Since it began in 2010, C Club has become the artistic engine of Move Through Life. As I’m sure you’ve surmised, C Club fulfils the three functions mentioned by Robinson; it is a creative team that facilitates creativity of its members and embeds the importance of creativity and innovation into the culture of MTL.

Anyone can be a creative leader

Creative leadership is not limited to the CEO, founder or business owner. It behoves all ‘recognised’ leaders (that is, those with the formal leadership role such as CEOs, senior managers, Board members, community leaders) to fulfil the creative leadership brief. Creative leadership demonstrated at the top of a hierarchy has a powerful ripple effect. However, this doesn’t mean only those at the top of the pyramid can be creative leaders. People at all levels have the capacity to exercise creative leadership, whether their influence is formal or informal. Even someone on the frontline or shopfloor can be a creative leader – that is, to fulfil Ken Robinson’s three functions outlined above. So if you are reading this and wondering if it is relevant to you, it is, regardless of your official title within an organisation. If you are the CEO, founder or business owner, take note; you are advised to encourage others within your organisation to view themselves as creative leaders.

How does creative leadership drive success?

A creative leader typically engages in numerous behaviours to fulfil their role. They:

1. consult
2. direct
3. initiate and reassure
4. pollinate and facilitate
5. model, respond and balance
6. evaluate and reward.

Consult

By consulting, a creative leader invites others to have input, thereby harnessing the creative potential of a living system of people; people who want to feel valued and useful, and to have a sense of ownership in what they do.

In addition to the monthly C Club at MTL, we have quarterly full company meetings and an annual consultation session with company members, class participants and other organisation members to check that we are on track and to solicit the imaginations of our dancers.

Over time, this has alerted me to tensions within the group that I was then able to resolve, it has lead us to redesign our pricing systems (something we continue to do as the needs of our members change), to shift the direction of our artistic vision, and greater engagement by the company members. It’s important to that with MTL, the company members are not paid staff members. We have positioned the company so that the dancers view themselves as members of a collective, and as such they make a regular financial contribution, as well as organising fundraising events and promoting the company and our work. We could have simply positioned them as customers, but we would not have had the same engagement and commitment if we’d taken this view.

Direct

There are times when a creative leader needs to direct. While everyone has great ideas, it is the leader’s responsibility to determine which ideas will support core objectives, and to provide clear direction about the strategies and expectations for creativity, as well as policies, procedures, reward systems, support mechanisms and physical spaces to embed creativity within the organisation or group.

When I began Move Through Life, I didn’t see myself as a leader. I just wanted to make things happen. But over time, I started to realise that people wanted direction from me. They wanted the security of knowing that I had things under control, and that I would be prepared to make the tough decisions.

Initiate & reassure

Creative leaders initiate and reassure. They recognise when change is required, understand how to make it happen, have the courage to attempt it and the determination to realise it. They support others through the change process by sharing the rationale for change and new expectations, demystifying the challenges, and clarifying the inevitable ambiguity associated with change, to enable those affected by and involved in the change to move forward with as little anxiety and fear as possible.

In 2010, when I established C Club, I also implemented the Expand Choreographic Program, which challenges choreographers to be bold and to take risks in developing their work. Choreographers are given rehearsal space and dancers to develop new work. They are supported through the conversations in C Club, access to highly experienced mentors, and the chance to present their work at quarterly Work in Progress (WIP) workshops with an artistic advisory group comprised of successful and respected choreographers. The company members found this incredibly challenging, and it took us two years to realise the fruits of the program, but it was a massive leap forward in the work we produced and the skills of both choreographers and dancers.

Pollinate and facilitate

Like honey bees, a creative leader pollinates and facilitates. They inspire creative leadership in others and in doing so, disperse the qualities of creative leadership throughout an organisation. They can do this by helping others develop their creative skills, and ensuring these skills are used, and by designing opportunities for others to connect, learn and share ideas and knowledge through informal means.

Move Through Life’s C Club and Expand program are examples of this kind of pollination/facilitation at work.

Model, respond and balance

A creative leader also models, responds, and balances. The leader must model the creative behaviour they want to see in others, they must adapt and respond to the creative ideas that emerge from others, and they must balance the natural tension between creativity and value capture, and the need to both take and control risks.

I participate in the activities of Move Through Life in the same way the others do. I participate in workshops and weekly classes, develop my own choreographic work that is presented alongside that of other choreographers, work with a mentor and present my work at the quarterly WIPs, and participate as a dancer in the development of work by other choreographers. Through the C Club and company meetings and annual consultation, I’ve adapted the direction of Move Through Life as a result of the wonderful suggestions from company members. And while I love new ideas, I conduct a thorough business analysis of each new idea before we implement, and continue to monitor outcomes through both quantitative and qualitative means.

Evaluate and reward

Finally, a creative leader evaluates and rewards. There are plenty of people who shy away from creativity because they consider it unpredictable, unreliable and unmeasurable. While it may not be possible to measure every element of creativity, it is certainly possible to develop clear criteria to measure success. And once you know what you are evaluating, you can choose how to reward people for their involvement. As an arts organisation, the quality of our artistic work is obviously important to us, but we’re also concerned with more prosaic outcomes, such as financial performance and head counts. Our success measures for our class program relate to financial outcome (we have a target surplus we aim to achieve for each block of six classes), average class size, attendance rates, new and returning participants, and conversion of enquiries into attendance.

I am a self confessed data nerd – I love tables and graphs and spreadsheets, so it’s always gratifying to look at these figures and see that our investment in high quality teachers and the risks we take in offering new classes or new pricing systems are paying off. Each quarter, the Board reviews the income generated, and if we continue to grow our revenue (which we have done consistently over the last few years) then we increase the monthly fee of our Class Coordinator. Recently, we recently completed a sell out season of the company’s lastest work ‘Soul Night at the Cinnamon Lounge’. It was a success on all levels – the audience loved it, we had great reviews, we sold out, and we achieved a financial outcome better than budget. A lot of this was due to the design work and artistic coordination of our Associate Artistic Director, and so I was delighted to be able to offer her a bonus. Of course, not all our rewards are financial. The measures of success for Cinnamon Lounge that I mentioned previously were all intrinsic rewards for all company members.

∗

If we return now to Senge’s ‘principle of leverage’ you can see how creative leadership is the lever that unlocks the creative potential of a group of people – be that an organisation, a community, a network or a team. If a leader were to focus all of their attention on coming up with great ideas themselves, the breadth of ideas generated from a greater number of people would be lost. The creative ideas generated by the leader may miss the mark, may not resonate with others in the organisation or group, and therefore would be neither embraced nor effective. The intrinsic satisfaction arising from being listened to, to having a reason to daydream and come up with new ideas, from sharing and bouncing ideas around with colleagues would be lost. Instead, when a leader commits to the mantle of creative leadership and behaves in ways that establish a creativity incubator, the results are powerful and tangible, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (to trot out that old adage). For me, personally, I could never have established a dance company and sustained it for ten years without the creative input and ideas from the others who travelled that road with me, but I also know that they wouldn’t have come together without me. They needed my vision, enthusiasm and, let’s be frank, naive idealism, to be confident about what they had to offer, to see themselves as creative individuals, to start to entertain and pay attention to creative ideas, and to make a regular commitment to being creative.

The examples I’ve given in this article cover a quite particular context – a not-for-profit arts organisation. If you’d like to promote some of the work you’ve done a creative leader, or to share a story about a creative leader who has inspired you, please comment on this article or email me at jo.mcdonald@thedragonflysolution.com.au. I’ll feature some of the most interesting and inspiring stories in future articles about creative leadership. How have you consulted, directed, initiated, reassured, pollinated, modelled, responded, balanced, evaluated or rewarded to result in creative outputs from others?

Jo McDonald is the founder of both The Dragonfly Solution and Move Through Life. She has a background in psychology, creative industries, organisational and workforce development and the arts sector. The Dragonfly Solution is a creativity consultancy that works with individuals, organisations and communities to help them be more creative, more often, so that they can thrive in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world. Jo’s partner at Dragonfly is Ben Marton, an ex-teacher, comic afficionado and conniseur of popular culture. Move Through Life is a not-for-profit organisation that has a vision to inspire and enable adults to dance so they are physically, creatively, mentally and socially active throughout their lives. The people involved in Move Through Life include ex-professional dancers, dance teachers, aspiring dancers and dance novices.