If you want to be a leader in your organization and you’re not one now, what are you doing about it? Maybe you’re toiling away hoping your boss will see your leadership potential, or you’re certain the higher-ups might have sensed your interest in leadership in the myriad of memos or reports you’ve carefully written and submitted. Call it your stealth leadership campaign.
How’s that working for you? Leadership, especially creative leadership, isn’t the result of stealth. Leadership comes to you, in part, because you exhibit the traits and initiative that encourage your boss to further empower you to leadership and a guiding role in your department, division or company.
For me, creative leadership is not about the position you hold inside the organization, it is about how you live in that position. It is your state of mind and how you approach your work and the values you bring to that work that makes you a leader. The rest is merely a title that can be taken away as easily as it is awarded.
I believe wholeheartedly that every single person inside an organization can be a leader, whether they mop the floors at night or sign the checks in the morning. Every day, everyone, a leader. It is one of the central precepts of Creative Leadership, a theory I have proposed with scholars Sudhir Venkatesh and David Slocum.
Creative leadership is built on the belief that everyone at every level in the organization is a leader; that leaders must know themselves, alert to their failings and graces, to better serve the organization; and that only by mastering complexity – both human and organizational – will leaders be able to achieve alignment.
Creative leaders must be more than big personalities. They are not born to leadership. Their charisma does not determine their success. Creative leaders, first and foremost, understand who they are and what they contribute to the organization. It is a form of democracy that recognizes the unique role and contributions of every member of the team.
An essential quality for these types of creative leaders is their courage, even while facing the potential of great personal or professional loss. In that vein, I’d like to share an anecdote about a person who took a significant risk to exhibit that rare type of personal leadership, Joe Guthrie, my father.
My father worked for many years as a scientist at Alcoa. He is a quiet and humble man, not someone blessed, I think even he would agree, with an enormous well of charisma. After he retired, he became very engaged in the fracking (deep-well drilling) issue in western Pennsylvania. He lives along the Marcellus Shale belt, and he objected to the controversial process of fracking that is employed to extract oil from the shale.
At one point, he announced he was going to run for his local city council to further his efforts, a daunting task considering his political activities up to that point constituted voting and the occasional anti-war rally. He campaigned for six months, going door-to-door and fighting against the odds. Eventually, he lost the race.
When I talked to him after the loss, I realized that losing didn’t matter to him, and certainly not to me. The critical point was that he was so passionately engaged with the topic that he seized an opportunity to contribute more fully to his community, to become a civic leader.
Even in failure, my father was a creative leader because he took the risk, he was passionate in his views, and he dared to be an active member of his community and to assume a leadership role. He lived outside his comfort zone. Most importantly, he answered the question every leader must face at some point in their lives: What are you prepared to do? It’s a lesson I felt deeply then and still do.
It is that kind of personal courage that defines creative leaders. Its absence is equally telling. Often I encounter executives in organizations who are frozen in place, unable to take the steps they need to improve the companies they lead because they are fearful. They are afraid to rock the status quo, afraid to challenge the powers that be, afraid to rise above their discomfort to do the “right” thing to move the organization more fully toward its goals.
When I see their fear, it reminds me that truly creative leadership demands much from individuals, frequently even more from front-line workers than the executives above them. By taking on the mantle of leadership, everyone at every level of the organization takes a risk, albeit one that is hopefully leavened by the other elements of Creative Leadership such as humility, introspection and trust.
Creative Leadership thus seeks small-d democracy in organizational settings, although I do not believe in a shared, Kumbaya-style leadership where no one is in charge and decisions are made by consensus. That is a recipe for disaster for any organization, whether it be a family or a multinational corporation. My vision of organizational democracy is one where individuals eschew victimhood and seek to actively support and influence the organization’s vision and goals.
One of the people I like to call out as a creative leader is Don Davis, a former two-time Super Bowl champion and a regional director of the NFL Players Association and the director of the NFL Programs for Pro Athletes Outreach, a conference based ministry for professional athletes in the National Football League.
Davis believes in the transformational power of education to advance players in their post-football careers, because it provides the knowledge and expertise they need to be leaders in other fields and to develop businesses that allow them to leverage their extensive backgrounds. Toward that end, Davis has sought that kind of business intelligence for himself and other players through the STAR EMBA program, an innovative executive MBA program offered by the George Washington University School of Business that provides key business skills and knowledge to participants.
Davis has a tremendous amount of passion for his work. He also has insight into how best to elevate players’ concerns and motivate them to greater leadership. In that sense, he understands how best to maneuver a complex system like the NFL and align the players personal and professional goals with the needs of their teams.
What continually impresses me about Davis is his ability to recognize the desires, skills and experiences that NFL players bring to the table. He sees the advantage to giving them the tools they need to be become creative leaders who contribute in large and small ways to their organizations, whether it’s their current teams or their own businesses after their gridiron careers have ended.
Let me reiterate, creative leadership is not the province of the person at the pinnacle of the organization. Instead, it is available to everyone who has the capacity to influence and change that organization. All they need do to become leaders, in this sense, is to seize leadership moments every single day.
What comes from this kind of leadership? Creativity, risk-taking, openness to new ideas and innovation, to name a few. Leaders must take the risk of casting aside perfection in order to support a creative and democratic chaos. In exchange they will breed a more innovative, more committed and more effective organization, all of which can lead to greater organizational and individual success. That doesn’t mean that things can’t go wrong and people won’t fail. Empowering everyone inside an organization can lead to trouble if the organization doesn’t see advantages to this type of wholesale engagement.
So, forget about your stealth campaign to a promotion and waiting for leaders to empower you. Take the opportunity you know exists today and be the creative leader you already are. Answer the question, for you and your organization: What are you prepared to do?
