Good Boss. Bad Boss.
The importance of setting the vision and managing for creativity.
Most people work in businesses in teams in one form or another and, according to the authors of one study on creativity in the workplace, ‘Of all of the forces that impinge on people’s daily experience of the work environment in these organizations, one of the most immediate and potent is likely to be the leadership of these teams — those “local leaders” who direct and evaluate their work, facilitate or impede their access to resources and information, and in myriad other ways touch their engagement with tasks and with other people.’ They should be able to keep tabs on the progress of projects and use their interpersonal networks to gather information relevant to them. And they should be open to others’ ideas and empathetic to the team members’ feelings.
Having the right team leadership makes all the difference between the good and the plain ugly when it comes to creative collaboration. A team leader’s negative behaviors have way more impact than any good behaviors can ever have. Dangerous boss behaviors are these: giving out assignments without understanding who has the capabilities needed to do them, or not considering other responsibilities they might have; micromanaging employees’ work; and not dealing properly with technical or interpersonal problems. According to the conclusions of a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School with the leaders of companies whose success depends on creativity good leaders don’t attempt to manage creativity, they manage for creativity, by providing a working environment and culture that allows creativity to flourish.
In fact, it’s a mistake to assume creativity will flow from one source: the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, tracked the progress of ideas that came from them and those that came from others within the organization and discovered that a greater success rate came from the ideas that came from elsewhere in the organization and not from the two founders. Leaders in businesses need to decrease the fear of failure, which means celebrating it as much as celebrating success. Creating a culture where happy, or serendipitous, accidents can happen is vital for innovation to thrive. In fact, former Time Warner chairman, Steve Ross, thought that people who didn’t make enough mistakes shouldn’t be rewarded for not screwing up, they should be fired for not taking enough risks. Good leaders know when to look for new ideas and when not to, in which case they communicate a vision and help their team understand their role in making it happen.
When interviewed for ‘The Business Playground’ (a book I co-authored with musician Dave Stewart), film and theater director Matthew Warchus — he was awarded a Tony in 2009 for directing ‘God of Carnage’ and in 2012 a Lawrence Olivier award for directing ‘Matilda’ - described how when directing a production he tries to create an environment where the fear of failure is reduced: ‘I’ve learnt there are two kinds of bad rehearsal rooms,’ he says. ‘One is with too much thinking, and one is with too much play, and because the strange thing about my job and putting a show together is that it requires an equal amount of play and thought, one can’t move forward without the other stepping in. What you have to do is zigzag between thought and play. In a conventional rehearsal room, for a week or two people would be sitting around a table discussing and then you’d reach the inevitable point when you’d have to stand up and start staging some of these things. That’s a point that causes a lot of anxiety for people crossing that threshold, a lot of tension.
‘People get too secure with the idea of just talking and thinking, and not with the idea of playing. But, instead, I always make sure that we stand up on the first day. So we’ll talk for maybe two or three hours about working on the script and the ideas for it, but before that day is finished we’ve stood up and just played with one of the scenes, or an idea or a song or something like that, because it removes the threat of that moment. The longer you put it off, the more daunting it gets. But also it puts fluidity into the rehearsal room, it puts mercury in. You get flow, an energy. Obviously you can do that by just people standing around and laughing, but you get a much more important thing which is people just feeling a freedom to get things wrong, to make a fool of themselves, to just go off at a tangent. It becomes a chaotic space, which is much more creative than a formal space.’ The lesson for business is to not wait too long before trying out, or prototyping, in some form an idea or innovation you’re working on before the fear of failure gets too daunting.
Matthew described how he keeps the process moving when large numbers of people are involved. ‘There are a lot of things that I do at the beginning of rehearsals that could be done by anybody in any situation. The thing about talking to lots of people, it’s a difficult thing. If I’m doing an opera, or a musical or a movie, there’ll be occasions when I turn up and I need to speak to 200 people at the same time and get them to do something, and at times like that you can’t allow a democratic thing to take place. Whereas when there are 3 people in a room, each of them can come up with 10 ideas in the space of the meeting, if there are 200 people involved in making a movie, by the time they’d all said their one idea you’ve run out of time to make the movie. I try to make sure I’ve expressed whatever my vision is about that scene or about the thing we’re trying to do, the scene change, or whatever it is. I get on a microphone and talk to everybody as if I was just talking to one person to say, “Inside my head, this is what I see, and hopefully this will explain why I’m asking you to try this. But, if this doesn’t work I’ll ask you to try something else in order to try and get the same thing in my head.” So I’ve found that when people know what production they’re in, when they know what the vision is for the thing, they’re happy. It bonds them together.’
Good leaders know when to look for new ideas and when not to, in which case they communicate their vision and help their team understand their role in making it happen.
Mark is a brand strategist and co-author of business book ‘The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide.’
