Leading Creativity

The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued. So it’s much more about creating climates. I think it’s a big shift for a lot of people.”

– Sir Ken Robinson.

Creative Leadership (not to be confused with someone who is simply a leader of people in the creative industry) has been defined as a style of leadership based on the concept of working collaboratively to develop innovative ideas by creating an environment that promotes creativity. The environment should support, trigger, enable and sustain creative thinking, both physically and psychologically.?

Credit: John Maeda and Becky Bermont: Redesigning Leadership

As more emphasis is put on design across the business - design systems, design operations, and the tools or environments that enable them, become mission critical. I believe that creative leadership applied across design teams can contribute to the most productive business outcomes for the entire organization.?

My Leadership Style

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”

― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

I prefer to anchor my leadership within the context of the core values I try to live by - beginning with mutual respect, open communication, patience and empathy. I believe in bringing together diverse and interdisciplinary teams of analytical thinkers, each with complementary strengths, similar standards of excellence and a spirit of innovation. When those people are empowered with the right degree of creative freedom and autonomy, they can reach higher goals and achieve world-class design outcomes.?

Making data-driven decisions creates democratic collaborative environments where everyone has a part to play in creating life-enriching design developments. The maturity of the creative process requires practice, but I believe it is this process that gives people the intuition to understand best how they can deliver value over time.

I believe in situational leadership where - as a servant leader, we are there to support the team to succeed, whilst helping out however we can when they need us.

That being said - I also believe I don’t have everything figured out. As the environment evolves around us, all of us must continue to adapt, being cognisant that we all have a role to make this world a better place.

“A critical skill for responsible leaders is to say I might be wrong’ – and mean it.”?

– Adam Grant

Leadership to Nurture Design Maturity

Currently I manage a multidisciplinary team, composed of a group of designers, industrial designers, a UI/UX designer, and a few product managers. Some of these people are very artistic and creative. Others are very business driven, but all of us are working towards optimal design maturity within JCH.?

Companies that are at the top levels of design maturity are tackling design in a truly integrated way that is elevating strategy, increasing market share, and surging employee impact, as reported in InVision’s Design Frontier report .?

Design brings a unique lens to strategy through exploratory user research techniques, trends and foresight research that assess product market fit, and the delivery of unified cross-platform strategies. As a result, companies who have the greatest design maturity report that design has an impact on the widest range of benefits, from employee productivity to growth in market share, to the development of new intellectual property.

The impact of design is evident when it creates social, economical, technological, and business influence. Therefore, for companies who want to ensure they are growing their market position, operating efficiently, producing quality products and improving business profitability….? effective design leadership is vital.?

Credit: Invision

Creativity at Executive Level

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

?Albert Einstein.

I’ve always believed that nurturing, encouraging and empowering designers to think more creatively in their roles is key to business growth across the board. I’m not the only one.?

Deloitte UK published a report recently on the scale of the Creative Industry. At the moment we represent around 7% of global employment but this is growing exponentially and at the current rate, this figure could rise to 40% by 2030, adding more than 8 million additional jobs in the 9 economies studied. The study posited that the Creative Economy is actually likely to be a key driver of economic growth in the long term.?

What the report doesn’t mention however, is the wider business benefits that will be achieved as a result of more creative thinking cross-functionally. While it is imperative that we have processes and tools throughout collaboration, it is the individuals and their interactions that produce value. We must all be able to respond to change, and this is a mandate as a whole.

When design creativity is championed within businesses, there is far more scope for innovation, and potential new directions for the brand that align with future business objectives. Executive creative leadership helps to shape the moving puzzles when creating design concepts through cross functioning teams strategically, while effectively translating these concepts to other executive directors and decision makers “in their own language”.?

Overseeing creative budgets and its investment value on the impact of the brand image drives the economics of the design function so that it can profitably deliver business value, and creating tactical, sustainable and disruptive goals for the creative teams that deliver design maturity . When design takes centre stage, it can have a direct impact on tangible business results, like revenue, valuation, and time to market.

Credit: McKinsey Design Report?

Anchoring the overall business purpose, and that of each individual who is contributing to it, whilst modeling creative thinking will evolve into positive change over time, for individuals, for teams, and for entire companies, so that everybody knows they are contributing to a higher objective. The outcome of design culture transformation focuses on not just product outcome, but to employ design thinking to everything inside the organization as well.

Nurturing this type of creativity cross-functionally within the whole organisation, as McKinsey reports - is a key driver of business success.?

Individuals cannot be relied upon to consistently bring creativity to businesses. But whole organisations, working together in an environment that reveres and celebrates creativity, with effective design leadership that supports and listens to teams driven by a noble purpose - could create the magical balance between top down and bottom up.