Leading_Creativity

Leading Creativity:

Effective Leadership of Knowledge Teams

Heather L. Bruce

Food Science Australia, P. O. Box 3312, Tingalpa, Queensland, Australia 4173

Introduction

The word leadership is a noun derived from the verb "to lead", which is defined in the Macquarie Dictionary as "1. to take or conduct the way; to go before or with to show the way; 2. to conduct by holding and guiding; 3. to guide in direction, course, action, opinion, etc.; to influence or induce.". The same dictionary defines a leader as "1. one who or that which leads. 2. a guiding or directing head, as of any army, movement etc.". As well, leadership is defined as "1. the position, function, or guidance of a leader; 2. ability to lead.". The ability of a person to lead a team is usually assessed by upper management on the basis of the ability of the team to perform. Performance of a team is measured by the ability of the team to satisfy specific performance indicators such as meeting project milestones/deadlines, completing work within budget constraints, or increasing team revenue. In knowledge-based organisations such as research institutes, universities or research and development departments, teams not only must meet project deadlines and stay within budget but also must generate ideas and proposals for future work. The number of proposals submitted and accepted can be used as a measure of team effectiveness as well, and is ultimately a measure of team creativity.

Creativity has become the economic edge for businesses entering the new millennium. Creative processes give an economic advantage through new products or processes that not only expand existing market shares but also create new markets, thus increasing profits. Industry is now seeking profit not solely through increased production and economic rationalisation, but through innovation. As a result, the demand for technical, procedural or intellectual expertise has increased dramatically and created what has been phrased the "knowledge era". Yet, despite organisations having gathered a great deal of knowledge through expertise and information, creativity still eludes many of them.

Creativity does not stem from expertise alone. Expertise is one of the three components of creativity. The other two necessary components are creative thinking skills and intrinsic motivation1. In order for a person or a team to be creative, all three components must be present. The challenge for a leader of a knowledge-based team composed of highly skilled professionals then is to assure that the team environment is one that facilitates the free flow of expertise, encourages creative thinking and capitalises on intrinsic motivation. This literature review outlines the team factors that affect team creativity and performance, and discusses tools that a leader of a knowledge-based team can use to enhance team performance and "lead" creativity.

Creativity

A leader must first understand the elements of creativity and the factors that affect them in order to maximise creativity in a knowledge-based team. The elements of creativity, as mentioned previously, are expertise, creative-thinking skills and motivation1. Amabile¹ defines expertise as "everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work". How a person has acquired this expertise is irrelevant, and this lifetime acquisition of a network of skills constitutes a person's expertise. Amabile¹ describes creative thinking as "how people approach problems and solutions - their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations". Motivation is derived from the noun 'motive' which is defined by the Macquarie Dictionary as "something that prompts a person to act in a certain way or that determines volition; an incentive". Amabile's research1 showed that there are two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside a person, and common examples of extrinsic motivation are monetary reward or the fear of job loss. Intrinsic motivation comes from inside a person and could stem from a passionate interest in a subject or the challenge of doing a difficult task well.

In a knowledge team, which would be a team already populated by experts and creative thinkers, motivation would be critical to the creative success of the team. Indeed, Amabile identified intrinsic motivation as the most important component of the three1. The research reviewed by Amabile¹ showed that people were most creative when they felt motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself and not by external pressures. In fact, Amabile¹ noted that the most creative people were not necessarily the most intelligent, but certainly were the most diligent and thus the most motivated. Therefore, a challenge to the leader of a knowledge team is to provide or produce a team environment that sustains and exploits the intrinsic motivations of the team members.

Facilitating Creativity

Amabile¹ listed six ways by which a team leader can stimulate team creativity. These managerial practices to encourage creativity were distilled from research on dozens of companies that investigated the link between work environment and creativity through interviews, surveys and controlled experiments.

Matching Abilities to Tasks

The first, and perhaps the most important, way for the coordinator or team leader to maximise creativity is to recognise the merits of each team member and match abilities to tasks. By matching team member abilities to tasks, the leader can exploit the intrinsic motivations of a knowledge-based team1. Perfect matches of employee to task, according to Amabile¹, are achieved when the joinings not only "match people with jobs that play to their expertise and their skills in creative thinking, and ignite intrinsic motivation" but "stretch employees' abilities". According to Amabile¹, this is the first action a team leader can take toward stimulating creativity, and it requires a team leader to know detailed information about the team members1. If a team leader does not have such detailed information, then the team leader will need to provide a team atmosphere that encourages self-disclosure and volunteerism in order to expose the intrinsic motivations of the team members.

Matching staff to tasks according to ability may reduce the amount of performance anxiety that staff suffer, thus decreasing stress and allowing staff to focus on the task rather than on their technical competence. This anxiety stems from the conflict between a fear of failure, which is a healthy, motivating fear, and fear of reprisal from the team leader, which is an unhealthy, paralysing fear. Unhealthy fear can cause people or organisations to lapse into self-defeating behaviours such as cutting corners, lying, minimising shortcomings, or blaming others which reduce team cohesion and decrease productivity and creativity2.

Freedom

The second action a team leader can take to increase team creativity is to provide team members with the freedom to decide how to achieve the allocated task or objective. Amabile¹ concluded that:
"Autonomy around process fosters creativity because giving people freedom in how they approach their work heightens their intrinsic motivation and sense of ownership. Freedom about process also allows people to approach problems in ways that make the most of their expertise and their creative-thinking skills."1
The key to the success of this action, however, is to ensure that the goal or objective to be tasked is communicated clearly and is understood by the team member, and that the goal or objective does not continually change1. With a clearly defined goal, the employee can focus and proceed, and no time is lost through performing unnecessary tasks or anxiously deciphering orders.

Resource Management

Two main resources ultimately limit creativity: time and money1. Fair and appropriate management of time and money is the third way that the team leader can stimulate team creativity. With regard to time, deadlines can be used to increase intrinsic motivation, but will reduce motivation if they are artificial or issued with little notice. Artificial deadlines decrease the time and freedom employees need to explore processes to complete their task. As well, short deadlines can create a rift of mistrust between the team leader and the team members, which will decrease team morale and reduce intrinsic motivation1.

Increasing money to a team does not necessarily equal increased creativity, but restriction of money can inhibit creativity1. When money is limited, team members are often pushed to be creative in finding additional resources rather than in the development of new ideas.

Team Diversity and Core Beliefs

The fourth way that a team leader can encourage creativity, according to Amabile¹, is to "create mutually supportive groups with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds". Despite their diversity, team members must share excitement over the team's goal, display a willingness to help other members through difficult periods and must recognise the unique knowledge and perspective each member brings to the team. Bringing together different expertise and creative thinking styles in order to produce innovative ideas is easy to do, but the likelihood of all employees supporting each other is slim. To bring together a mutually supportive group immediately would mean that only people who liked each other would work together, and this does not guarantee diversity. Therefore, a team leader must introduce a core belief system that fosters mutually supportive behaviour within the diversity of values and beliefs that may exist in the team.

Hardy and Schwartz² describe a core belief system that is found in most high performing teams, and it provides an atmosphere of mutual support in the workplace. Hardy and Schwartz² observed that healthy organisations had a fear of low performance, practiced honesty between and among management and staff, had open-minded management and staff, shared costs and benefits amongst staff, "maximised" or widely recognised results, and allowed employee ownership of success. These characteristics greatly reduce fear that stems from uncertainty and improve the emotional climate of the team.

Veronique Tran³ emphasised the importance of a good emotional climate, which is often overlooked in the rational measures of organisational behaviour. She quotes David Goleman⁴ to illustrate the effects of a fearful workplace climate:
"the destructive effects of miserable morale, intimidated workers, or arrogant bosses - or any of the dozens of other permutations of emotional deficiencies in the workplace - can go largely unnoticed by those outside the immediate scene. But the costs can be read in signs such as decreased productivity, an increase in missed deadlines, mistakes and mishaps, and exodus of employees to more congenial settings. There is inevitably, a cost to the bottom line from low levels of emotional intelligence on the job. When it is rampant, companies can crash and burn".⁴

Tran³ summarises by saying "When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly" and hypothesised that emotional climate significantly affects organisational dynamics such as idea-generation and creativity, adaptability to change, decision-making and learning. She is currently developing a test to diagnose the emotional climate of a workplace, which will be useful to team leaders assessing team emotional health.

Supervisory Encouragement

A fifth way that a team leader can stimulate creativity is through encouragement. Creative efforts, whether successful or not, need to be praised. Praising an employee is the equivalent to being her cheering section, and this support will fuel her intrinsic motivation to perform1. Praising creativity also shows the team member or members that their effort and diligence is appreciated, and this assists the team to sustain its passion for its work.

The Socratic model, widely used in science and academia, focuses on critical evaluation and not creativity. Most knowledge workers have had lengthy formal training and study and are thus thoroughly indoctrinated in critical thinking. As a result, leaders of knowledge teams often unknowingly kill creativity by immediately evaluating or criticising the prototype resulting from a team's creative process rather than first cheering the success of making a prototype. The team leader must not kill creativity with criticism but must keep an open mind because the creative process of the team may be different from her own.

Knowledge workers such as researchers are usually introverts who reap great personal satisfaction from solving problems and accomplishing what others have not. Just the sense of accomplishment is sufficient for a knowledge worker, but it can be greatly enhanced by praise. Alternative behaviour for a team leader that is concerned about the practicality of a prototype would be that she first praise the team's creativity and then broach her concerns by asking if an evaluation of the prototype by the team is the next order of the day. By the team itself evaluating the prototype it has ownership and control of changes required.

Amabile¹ also recommends that supervisory encouragement can come from the team leader being a model of creativity. A team leader that perseveres through difficult problems and encourages collaboration and communication within the team will be reinforcing the three components of the creative process. Modelling the desirable behaviour is often the most effective and inexpensive way of teaching team members the creative process, as workshops can be costly and time consuming and may not be greeted with enthusiasm.

Organisational Support

Teresa Amabile¹ wrote, "creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organisation supports it". This support must come particularly from the leaders within the organisation who must create procedures and support core beliefs that are conducive to creativity1:
"Most important, an organisation's leaders can support creativity by mandating information sharing and collaboration and by ensuring that political problems do not fester. Information sharing and collaboration support all three components of creativity. Take expertise. The more often people exchange ideas and data by working together, the more knowledge they will have. The same dynamic can be said for creative thinking. In fact, one way to enhance the creative thinking of employees is to expose them to various approaches to problem solving".1
These procedures and core beliefs give team leaders the mandate to dismantle cliques and expose "politicking" in order to keep team members from feeling that their work is threatened by the agendas of others and to keep them sharing information.

Leadership Styles to Enhance Creativity

Traditionally, the best and brightest specialists were promoted to positions of leadership, on the strength of the rationale that their creative success would permeate the team they headed. The legacy of this strategy, however, is knowledge organisations that are often financially and intellectually weakened by these brilliant specialists who were actually incompetent, autocratic leaders. Even today, few technical specialists are schooled in general management and, as a consequence, most learn from experience or need to receive management and leadership training after their appointment.

Recent research is showing that classic directive leadership or traditional autocratic management strategies are not effective in knowledge organisations or teams, and that knowledge workers respond to inspiration rather than supervision5. Harry Mintzberg⁵ rightly notes that, in knowledge teams, the members are there because they are highly proficient at what they do so they need little coaching at a technical level. What they do need, according to Mintzberg⁵, is inspiration, protection and support, all of which agree with the creativity-enhancing supervisory encouragement and organisational support of Amabile¹. Mintzberg⁵ described the type of leadership required to effectively lead a knowledge team as "covert leadership" because it is leadership that is delivered subtly through everything the leader does.

Leadership is generally accepted to occur at three different levels: the individual level where leaders mentor, coach and motivate; the group level, where leaders build teams and resolve conflicts; and at the organisational level, where leaders build culture5. On the individual and team levels, leaders can covertly inspire and energise just by treating team members as "respected members of a cohesive social system"5. Mintzberg⁵ stipulates that covert leadership establishes the team culture because the leader sets the culture standard through behaviour. Hardy and Schwartz² also noted that a leader is only effective if her behaviour matches her directives. Therefore, the behaviour of a leader establishes the culture of the team or organisation, regardless of whether directives accompany the behaviour or not.

In light of this evidence, a leader should be able to establish a culture of creativity and Amabile¹ agrees. Amabile¹ reinforces that covert leadership establishes the culture of professional organisations when she says "managers can support creativity by serving as role models, persevering through tough problems as well as encouraging collaboration and communication within the team". Mintzberg⁵ argues that overt leadership usually is most effective at controlling work processes. Interestingly, Mintzberg⁵ notes that structure and coordination inherent to the profession usually prescribe the work processes of knowledge organisations, so little overt leadership should be required.

The characteristics of a covert leader described by Mintzberg⁵ and of a leader supportive of creativity described by Amabile¹ are essentially those espoused by a participative management style. Participative management is indeed the style of choice for performing teams, but it is not the appropriate style for newly formed teams. During the forming stage, the team leader must be directive in order to establish team structure and define each person's role while the team members politely get acquainted and explore each other's values. Once the team members have acclimatised to the team, communication becomes decreasingly ritualistic, and personal relationships are sorted according to personal power, influences, commonalities and differences. During this stage, team members question and clarify goals and objectives, identify rewards and limitations, and generate methods of achieving the task before them. At this time, communication is more volatile than during the forming stage as team members relax. As each member strives to establish their role or position in the team, many become introspective, confrontational, defensive or questioning. Timid members of the team may withdraw or begin exhibiting avoidance as the team environment becomes unsavoury. The team leader will need to coach the team members through this stage by conciliating conflicts, answering questions, discouraging cliques, revealing hidden agendas and drawing upon introspective team members.6

Once the team members have reached agreement on the project objectives and have accepted the duties and merits of each other, the team moves into the commitment and implementation phases. During these phases, the ground rules of the team are articulated and the goals, objectives and methods are established. Communication becomes respectful, hidden agendas have been revealed and people must trust the other team members to help them achieve their personal goals as well as the team goal. At this stage, the team leader must begin to use participative leadership to assist the team members to define their roles and responsibilities.6

The team reaches the performing stage once it has agreed on its goals, objectives and methods and organised its project strategy. During the performing stage, the team begins to achieve its objectives and obtain results using collaborative problem solving and through development of external links outside the team. The environment of a performing team is characterised by high spirits, mutual acceptance, cohesiveness, synergy and, most of all, productivity. The team leader delegates during this stage, and essentially keeps the team focussed and organised. The team leader also facilitates regular reviews of the progress of the project.6

An often forgotten portion of team development is the renewal phase, which occurs once a project has finished.6 At this stage, the team leader again becomes directive. The project is reviewed and evaluated, success is celebrated, goodbyes are said and a sense of closure is achieved. This stage is characterised by celebration, sadness, refection, disorientation, grief and hopefulness. Despite team members having a sense of achievement, they may also have a sense of loss that reduces motivation. At this stage, the team leader must acknowledge the success of the team and provide some sense of future direction to its members in order to re-ignite their enthusiasm.6

Characteristics of a Creative Leader

Goleman^4,7has found that the technical skills and intellectual acumen are important qualities of a leader, but that emotional intelligence is the most decisive factor affecting the success of a person as a leader. Goleman⁷ outlined five components of emotional intelligence that could be used as indicators of future leadership success. The first, self-awareness, was characterised by a person's ability to recognise and understand her moods, emotions and drives, and speculate as to their effect on other people. The second component of emotional intelligence is self-regulation, and is the ability of a person to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods and to suspend judgement in order to think before acting. A third component is motivation, which is exemplified by a passion for work for reasons other than money or status. The fourth, empathy, is the ability to understand the emotional constitution of other people and the skill to treat them accordingly. The final and fifth component is social skill, and is the proficiency to manage relationships and to build networks by finding common ground and establishing rapport with unfamiliar people.

Fortuitously, these five characteristics of an emotionally intelligent leader mesh well with the leadership strategies outlined by Amabile¹ that enhance team creativity. For example, self-awareness and self-regulation will prevent a leader from killing team creativity with impulsive criticism. Also, a highly motivated leader will incite the team with enthusiasm and purpose and keep them thinking creatively even during difficult times. As well, an empathic and socially skilled leader will attempt to match staff abilities to tasks and will give them the freedom to be creative.

Currently, there are no objective tests for emotional intelligence in order to guide management selection, though Goleman does provide subjective indicators of the five components of emotional intelligence. Each component has three hallmarks that can be used to subjectively assess the emotional intelligence of an individual. The hallmarks of self-awareness are self-confidence, realistic self-assessment and self-deprecating sense of humour. Self-regulation is indicated by trustworthiness and integrity, comfort with ambiguity and an openness to change. Motivation is shown through a strong drive to achieve, optimism in the face of failure and a strong commitment to the organisation. Empathy, perhaps the rarest of all the components, is shown through expertise in building and retaining talent, cross-cultural sensitivity and conscientious service to clients and customers. Social skill is exemplified by effectiveness in leading change, persuasiveness and the ability to build and lead teams effectively. Considering these components when evaluating a potential leader may increase the probability of assigning an appropriate person although, admittedly, the perceived abilities of the candidate will be gauged as relative to those of the assessor. Given this dilemma, there is certainly a need for an objective measure of emotional intelligence for use by organisations be they knowledge-based or otherwise.

Goleman⁷ is confident that emotional intelligence can be learned, but a training program that focuses on the neocortex using logic and concepts will not work. Goleman⁷ says that emotional intelligence is formed or learned in the limbic system, which is the part of the brain that governs feelings, impulses and drives. Goleman's research⁷ has shown that the limbic system learns best by extended practice, feedback and continuous motivation. In essence, emotional intelligence training must assist people to break old behavioural patterns and establish new ones in a language that the limbic system can understand. Currently, emotional intelligence is learned by an individual through personalised feedback and monitoring, as well as through mimicking role models. The study of emotional intelligence, however, is a burgeoning field of psychology, and its application to organisational behaviour has yet to be fully exploited.

Summary

All people have a certain level of creativity, and this creativity must be nurtured in a team of knowledge professionals. From the literature, team creativity is apparently affected most by the leader of the team and the team environment encouraged by that person. An emotionally intelligent leader, as described by Goleman⁷, is naturally inclined toward cultivating an atmosphere of creativity within a team. Much self-assurance, empathy and emotional control are required to objectively guide the creative processes of a team as described by Amabile¹, and these qualities can be found in a person of high emotional intelligence.

At present, team creativity is judged through tangible measures of success such as the number of proposals or products generated within a year and the income subsequently generated. There is, however, no objective way of predicting the effect a potential leader will have on team creativity. Further organisational behaviour research is needed to yield an objective test that estimates or predicts the emotional intelligence of a person considered as a leader. Such a test would facilitate the rehabilitation of creativity within an organisation, and would be a valuable succession planning tool.

References

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