In the last few years, I’ve noticed an emerging and accelerating trend, a call for creative leadership of organizations. As part of this movement, not only does my company offer a creative leadership development method, I also teach a “Creative Leadership” course to my graduate students in management. What is creative leadership, and why does it matter?

The call for creative leadership

In 2010, IBM surveyed 1,541 CEOs in 44 countries for the Global Chief Executive Officers Study 2010. When asked to identify the most important leadership qualities to capitalize on complexity, “creativity” was the most frequently mentioned, chosen by 60% of those interviewed. In Asia-Pacific, that number was even higher with 70%.

The authors of the study said, “In an uncertain and volatile world, CEOs realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experiment to create new business models. They invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communications styles, in order to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.”

The response to the call

In 2011, IBM conducted a follow-up study with more than 700 human resource officers from 61 countries to investigate how HR responded to the CEOs’ assertion that the development of future creative leaders would have the greatest effect on their organizations’ future success. Not surprisingly, the majority of the interviewed HR officers highlighted the need for their organizations to identify, develop and empower creative leaders. One U.K. HR director said, “We have strong managers, not leaders — and we need strong creative leaders to achieve our strategic objectives.”

However, while HR officers and their teams were well aware of this need, only one in three organizations claimed to be successful in meeting it — an astoundingly low number given the stated importance of creative leadership development.

What is creative leadership?

Clearly defining “creative leadership” is a key step for HR officers and their teams in their efforts to develop creative leadership candidates. The academic literature contains hundreds of definitions for “leadership” and “creativity,” but due to the novelty of the concept, there are relatively few attempts to define “creative leadership.” How can you find and develop creative leaders if you don’t know what they embody?

I’ve developed my own definition of the concept, starting from the definitions of “leadership” and “creativity.”

A simple definition of leadership is “the action of leading a group of people or an organization; or the state or position of being a leader.”

“Creativity” is harder to capture, but the various answers fall into three rough groupings:

• Person-based definitions center on individuals, who are seen as creative to the extent that they demonstrate certain abilities, achievements and/or personality traits, such as individuality, non-conformity to rules or the status quo, striving for originality and novelty, flexibility, persistence, and passion (or intrinsic motivation).

• Product-oriented definitions describe the characteristics that a creative product or outcome needs to have, such as novelty, appropriateness, relevance, worth or value, uniqueness, and originality.

• Finally, process-oriented definitions of creativity emphasize cognitive processes that lead to solutions, ideas, conceptualizations, artistic forms, theories or products that are unique, novel and meaningful.

What do all these definitions of creativity have in common? For a person, process or product to be judged to be creative, it must be novel (fresh, new, avant-garde, unprecedented), meaningful (valuable, worthwhile, useful, relevant) and unique (original, one-of-a-kind, individual).

Putting the pieces together, we get a definition of “Creative Leadership” as “the action of leading a group of people or an organization toward novel, unique and meaningful outcomes; or the state or position of being an authentically creative leader in an organization.” Notice the emphasis on “authentically”; in order to credibly lead a creative organization, you can’t fake it. You must be creative yourself; you must be able to creatively walk your creative talk.

The authors of the 2011 study of HR officers said, “To instill the dexterity and flexibility necessary to seize elusive opportunity, companies must move beyond traditional leadership development methods and find ways to inject within their leadership candidates not only the empirical skills necessary for effective management, but also the cognitive skills to drive creative solutions. The learning initiatives that enable this objective must be at least as creative as the leaders they seek to foster.” This is why my company’s creative leadership development product is based on the mindsets and cognitive skills of geniuses and creative business leaders. To develop creative leaders, it reconnects leaders to their inner genius. Isn’t now the best time to uncover your inner genius and become an authentically creative leader?

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2012. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 11 October 2012.