Emerald Insight Handbook of Business Strategy

www.emeraldinsight.com Vol. 5 No.1, 2004

NOT TAUGHT IN BUSINESS SCHOOLS:
Cultivating Creativity

By Michael H. Shenkman

Shenkman: Guest writer holds a mirror up to business

Name: Michael H. Shenkman Title: President Company: Strategic Development Group, Keystone International Inc.

GWEN
Gwen, an executive I mentor, was in the process of carving out a business of her own. We met in an outdoor café, on a beautiful spring day in Albuquerque, NM. I like to meet my clients in settings such as this now and then as these places help sometimes to relax my clients and free up the conversation. On this day, Gwen took full advantage of the setting. She brought a sketchbook with her, containing the artwork she had done during a course she just completed. We looked at the portraits and landscapes and enjoyed the mix of competence and amateurishness—all the ingredients of learning—they displayed. You might think that this “show and tell” was a strange thing to be doing during a business consultation, but, as you will see, in a way they were the most important part of the conversation.

But, the conversation didn’t stop there. Gwen was investigating what kind of a business to start, so there were important, more technical matters to discuss. As we reconsidered her decision to leave her job and start something on her own, she became reflective and paused the flow of conversation. Almost wistfully, seemingly out of the blue (of which there was an abundance in the New Mexico sky) she said, “You know, you do everything right, and it’s still not enough.”

“What do you mean by that,” I asked. I wondered if she was regretting her decision to move out on her own.

“You go to business school to learn all the right skills, learn how to run scenarios, plan optimal and worst case budgets, and you find out that this is not what leading is about at all.”

“You mean these skills aren’t useful once you reach a certain level?” I pressed.

“No, these skills are always useful. It’s just that leading isn’t about those skills. Leading is about being yourself, being open with and to other people. So you need to know who you are, and you need to be able to express that to others. You really need to know what is important to you. They don’t teach you that in business schools, and your bosses along the way never really help you with that either. Maybe it’s not in their interest to help you with that, I don’t know.

“This is something you end up discovering on your own,” she continued. “Or maybe, if you are lucky, you get to a mentor to help you discover it. But really, since I have been working with you, for instance, it has felt almost as though I was starting over.”

“Was that a bad thing?”

“No, but I was surprised. I thought I had everything I needed to succeed, and that wasn’t true. I felt let down in a way.”

“And now?”

“Now? Now I am excited. I’m doing something that I completely create. I’m even willing to sacrifice some income, be a little more insecure financially, so that I can do work that is important to me, and work with others for whom this project is also important. Really, no matter what happens, it will be worth it. Definitely worth it.”

This conversation happened after I had been working with Gwen for nearly two years. Nothing happens fast in mentoring. When I met her she was eager to expand her horizons and step into arenas of larger responsibilities, greater risks and consequences, and so, potentially affect more people. She saw this progression as occurring within the corporate structure, with changes in title, authority and income.

But from the start of our work, we both knew something else was at stake. When stepping into leadership roles, many young managers find that technical skills aren’t enough. While Gwen was an outstanding CFO—technically skilled, results-oriented, and attentive to the people around her—as of when I started working with her, she was a one trick pony. And she knew it. And she had a sense that there was “something else” she needed to consider, but she didn’t know what that was. Our work was to find out what that “something else” was.

CREATIVITY?
When I speak to groups about leading companies and organizations I am often asked what is the single most important thing a mentor does to help young people bridge the chasm between being good managers and effective leaders. Most expect that I will say something like having a vision, or being able to drive to get results. But, I go on to explain, these are merely by-products. So, my answer often surprises them. I answer that it is helping these people fully recall, recover and appreciate the creative talents and energies that they are able to express. Much of my effort, I tell them, intends to help leader prospects see how their creative practices can be made available and meaningful to others, and then helping them to use those talents appropriately to ignite aspiration and excitement in their collective endeavors.

Creativity? Why that? Even the most hard-nosed executive will have to acknowledge that a leader’s legitimacy, her effectiveness in winning the trust and enthusiastic following of bright, competent and eager employees, depends on someone being able to somehow or other convey a sense of immediacy and emotional involvement with the objectives and the people in the endeavor. Creative expression forms bridges from one person to another, makes us real, and validates for others our ability to learn and grow—along with them—in the experiences they are undergoing. After all, what else do the people who are actually doing the hands-on work of the endeavor have to go on but their trust and confidence in the leader?

Situations that require leaders, after all, as opposed to needing managers or administrators, are new for everyone involved. Outcomes are not predictable, success is often as much a matter of luck as good planning. The connection with the leader gives followers a sense of the worth, viability, safety for learning of the endeavor. That connection is often forged by using the same technique of blending discipline with empathy and sensitivity to others’ learning that is applied in teaching and learning creative practices.

Just what kinds of creative practices am I referring to? Well, I mean the obvious—painting, creative writing, playing a musical instrument. But I also see how leaders benefit from other kinds of self-creating expression, whether that be learning a sport (yes, even golf), yoga or martial arts, really studying a discipline or a subject—many leaders like studying a period of history or studying a specific historical figure—or doing extensive, non-business travel and adventure. By “creative” in this context I mean activities by which one has to grow, learn new skills, respond spontaneously, in order to master a situation. I prefer situations in which a teacher is involved—the mentoring, focusing, obligating interactions usually contribute important dimensions to the experience—but not always. The activity should be something with infinite learning horizons, so that the leader always knows there’s further to go, and always someone to learn from.

Gwen’s surprise at the direction our mentoring took is not unusual. Most of the young executives I work with have long ago abandoned their “youthful” pursuits of art or music or athletic or academic prowess. After all, most people in their mid-thirties or early forties have not had the need to be reflective. Their focus is on achieving: getting good grades to get into good schools and colleges, or learning new crafts that they hope will establish them in a community of producers, parents and citizens, learning the specific technologies of a managerial or business function; then working long and hard to climb the corporate ladder to “success.” This is all to the good.

But as many business leaders know, the usual motivations and incentives at a manager’s disposal often fall short of getting people to dedicate themselves at the levels being asked of them. Raises, promotions, bonuses, etc. are necessary, and are often matters of fairness—they are basic indications of the organization’s good intentions. And some businesses can’t even afford to offer those. To get dedicated performance from skilled and talented employees, leaders have to offer something else: they have to be willing to be an exemplar to these people, showing them how someone behaves, speaks, thinks and listens when they truly care about bringing something new and daring into the world, and learning from the process. Those indispensable leader roles of guide and trusted mentor are often reinforced and rehearsed while someone is pursuing the study and development of expressive creative practices. The lesson that I convey in this aspect of the mentoring is the importance of keeping those skills alive and vibrant, at the ready, immediately available as a means of enlivening the challenges faced at work.

AN UNKIND CUT?
I recall so clearly the poignancy and sadness in her statement that doing all the right things still wasn’t enough. I think the feelings she expressed reveal something else about the way many young managers feel about their careers as they step into leading responsibilities. At some point, as they encounter the challenges of leading, many of the best and the brightest of our managers realize that they have not only neglected efforts of self-reflection, but, in making their decision to become a business executive, they have actually made something like a conscious, visceral, existential decision to cut off whole parts of their lives in order to pursue their success.

Why is that so disturbing, you might ask. Of course, you might say, when a young person decides to become a musician, she also cuts herself off from other activities, as does the athlete who is determined to excel at the highest levels of sport. But, if we dig deeper into high levels of accomplishment, we find that this cutting off is not as productive as we might think. What concerns me is that if managers have no awareness of the ways they are creatively expressive, of the imaginative energies that enliven them, they cannot be aware of the quality of the relationships that they are putting into effect; they cannot be fully responsive in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles; they cannot fully hear, appreciate and incorporate the new, if unsettling, ideas that others offer in the face of these obstacles.

Thinking of Gwen, I recall that when we started our work two years ago, she personified this situation to a tee. At that time, she was CFO, a top executive in a dynamic and new company. She had come to that situation from a large corporation where her project management talents were perfectly utilized. In this new, more fluid and unsettled environment, however, the fit wasn’t as perfect. The company’s CEO judged her work to be crisp, efficient and effective, but also missing that spark that inspired people. Indeed, she played by the rules she had learned in her MBA program: sketch out the scenarios, best case, worst case; run the numbers; get the message right. And then, when the work was done, time to move on to the next assignment. She was tied to the spreadsheet as her sketchpad for crafting solutions.

In our early sessions, as we sat across a conference table from each other, in a small, windowless, overheated room for our hour and a half sessions, she conducted herself in a very reserved and professional way. She talked about her team, how she approached the issues, in highly technical language, and used me as a sounding board for her own ideas. That was all well and good, but it was not the direction I wanted the conversation to take. As far as enacting the role of the senior executive, she was doing fine. But, I was beginning to agree with the CEO’s doubts; was she a leader?

Since my role was to mentor her about leading, however, I wanted to find out what mattered to her, got her excited, what about her work and her life lit her up. From what was occurring well into our third session, I was beginning to wonder whether she ever got excited. Maybe, I thought, she just one of those even-keeled and steady managers that imperturbably moves from solving one problem after another.

But then there was her laugh: it was spontaneous, full, emotional and connected to the situation at hand. My role as a mentor is to pick up on all the signals I get from my clients. I pay attention to body language, eye contact, emotional reactions to little things. So I picked up on her laugh. Her laugh gave me a hint that there was more to Gwen than she was bringing into that conference room. So, going on that hunch, I kept probing, digging, trying to get a reaction other than the calm, collected “professional” she was portraying to me.

"Tell me how you assure that the people on your team are learning new skills and expanding their own sense of possibility.”

I asked that question fully expecting the same kind of assured and technically-oriented responses I had been getting so far. Instead, she paused. When she looked up, not quite at me, she even seemed puzzled. This signaled a new development in our conversation. She had always had the answers on the tip of her tongue, at the ready. She had always responded quickly, with assurance. It seemed that we had hit on something she hadn’t thought about, or maybe something that was bothering her—and that surprised me.

“Do you mean, how do I motivate them?” she asked.

“Well, what do you think I am asking you?”

Her frustration led to a confrontation. “Well,” she said with some irritation, “we are all professionals here, and I treat them like professionals. Their individual aspirations are up to them. Our job is to make sure that we get our products out there, with the right price, the right offer, and the right message. There’s a lot that people can learn in doing those things. I give them stretch goals, I listen to their conclusions and try not to override them so they will be supported and will stay motivated. But their aspirations, that’s up to them.”

“From what you are saying, you seem to be completely neutral about what people do and what they think or feel about life, as long as it is not immoral or unethical. Is that right? Tell me, what values do you think the people in your group get from you?”

“What do you mean, what are my values?”

Again a long pause. Then, she spoke, softly, and, uncharacteristically, tentatively, “Hard work. Honesty…” she said.

Her voice trailed off as her head sank down onto her arms. The movements of her shoulders told me that she was crying. She looked up, and through the tears, proclaimed adamantly, “I don’t know what my values are. And it really bothers me. I know people want me to be a role model to them, but I just don’t know how to do that or what I have to offer. And that bothers me a lot. ”

I remained silent as she started to think through this situation in which she suddenly, surprisingly, found herself.

“We had ethics courses in school, and we did ethical case studies, and all. But they were about obeying laws while meeting the legitimate demands of shareholders, or, sometimes, the community. We were never really asked about our personal values.” She paused.

“It started earlier than that,” she continued. “When I was a young girl, I was very artistic, very creative. My mother is an artist and I suppose I was emulating her. Then, sometime in my sophomore year in college, I decided that I had to ‘get serious.’ I gave up all my art classes and switched my major to business. It really upset my mother, but since I have been successful, she never questioned me about it.”

The harm done by cutting off one’s creative energies, segregating off the “personal” and/or “creative” from the “professional,” results (and I have to be “negative” here, for a moment) in a truncated view of the business life. This view, unfortunately portrays the manager as being some kind of drone, nose to the grindstone, workaholic. This cutting continues on in its effects, emptying business of its vitality, reducing business values to the lowest common denominator. As the recent corporate scandals have shown, business values are in a pathetic state. Pundits go around talking about ways to adjudicate between the competing interests of the business’s various stakeholders. But they offer absolutely nothing that puts the business on the same moral par as other aspects of our lives, such as our spiritual and environmental connections, our obligations to the health of our communities and families, the place that the business’s activities assume in the ongoing stories of how it contributed to the productive, meaningful, life-enhancing unfolding of the human drama.

On the other side of the ledger—and by far, one that more than out balances the negative—creative practices expand the horizons within which leaders work. The experiences involved in learning and growing within creative practices spark the urges and enhance the abilities of these young talents to lead in the larger arenas that influence and affect more people, that their dreams and ambitions envision. The great leaders, as Howard Gardner points out in Leading Minds, do have a detailed and in-depth understanding of their “domains,” of the technical knowledge required by the areas in which they work. But they transcend those realms in order to lead at the highest levels of their fields. Many have creative practices that explicitly and directly inform and enrich their leading. Winston Churchill was an accomplished landscape painter. He was also a highly talented historian. John F. Kennedy, even with his severe back pains, played sports, and he was also a serious student of history.

These leaders applied the values and skills learned in their creative practices to their professional fields in order to raise themselves to new levels of accomplishment and meaning for everyone affected by those fields. I wonder if Churchill would have responded to Hitler’s aggression as valiantly and bravely if he wasn’t completely steeped in the history of his family, nations and the world. As the film Thirteen Days points out, John F. Kennedy was always a student of history. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, even as President, he was studying Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, her exciting book about the conditions that sparked World War I. This creative practice of his specifically guided his determination and vision in resolving that crisis peacefully. His study of history also led to his direct engagement in creating the space program and beginning the process to ban nuclear testing.

GETTING BEYOND “GETTING SERIOUS”
Gwen’s sense of something having been lost as she decided to move out of an artist’s life into the world of business was strikingly clear. She gave up her artistic pursuits. And in the process, she gave up a piece of a relationship with her mother. She did this in the name of “getting serious.” The mere recollection of the decision and the consequent losses that ensued brought her to tears, as though she was in mourning for something lost.

Unfortunately, this is not an unusual story in my work with young and successful executives. Another client of mine was once a concert-quality pianist. He gave up playing completely, got his MBA and became a finance executive. Another was proficient at drawing and painting, and also became a finance executive. Others don’t give up a creative endeavor, but instead lead a “secret life” of writing poetry, painting or playing an instrument. Others distill all the various and inspiring lessons they learn from athletics into dogmas about competition and winning. I find it so interesting that business students, at the undergraduate and MBA levels, feel it necessary to give up these pursuits when they enter the life and mindset of the ‘serious’ executive. And, I offer, relinquishing these aspects of their lives at the altar of management science keeps them trapped in a mindset that keeps them from leading.

Why does this fact bother me? After all, medical interns don’t have time to do anything else but work in hospitals; law students are completely absorbed by their studies. What’s the problem? The problem I have is that these people are not only learning the technical skills of a managerial profession—as are the medical and legal students—they are envisioning roles as leaders, owners, chief executives of organizations that will have important affects on the lives of their organization’s stakeholders. Since leading is a crucial component of these people’s intentions—and that is not necessarily the case for a prospective doctor, lawyer or other professional—having access to the full range of learning’s expression is crucial for discovering one’s values and learning how to keep those values fresh and growing, able to adapt to difficult challenges. These creative practices, in other words, comprise the foundation of any leading that is worthy of the name.

And that brings me to my second concern about the consequences of the cutting off: it results in confusing managing and leading, or, even worse, it allows young practitioners to substitute one for the other. When I started with Gwen, she approached her work as would a project manager. Her attitude was that if the systems were good, well-run and logical, everything was fine. She always talked about having good intuition about people, but when others commented about her, as did her CEO, the observations was that everything came down to the spread sheet, she was rigid and disconnected. As the CEO noted, she was effective from a systems point of view, she did get many important things done at her job, but did not contribute to building the sense of team and camaraderie that was essential for the success of this young company.

As a result of our work together, and as she more and more recovered her creative side, she became more accessible to people. She did not feel compelled, for instance, to make an overt effort to hook up with people, share chit chat and be more sociable; it’s rather that she found that there was more to talk about in the normal course of her work. She found out that others were interested in art or writing or music, often because they shared that interest. She talked with them about the excitement, discouragements and sense of progress they all felt as they experienced these pursuits. Then, as they seamlessly segued into conversation about the business, the same kinds of observations, good humor, sharing and exchange of ideas—more as equals than as superior to inferior—flowed between them.

When the leader shows how the effort resonates in all dimensions of her life, more of her employees will be willing to do that as well. Bringing conversations and examples of her budding creative talents into work fully enriched Gwen’s business life, imbuing it with the same energy and significance she attached to other parts of her life. Others who worked with her felt the same way. She and her people were thus willing to stay around the office for an extra hour or two; they put more effort into the work they did, and they actually enjoyed it. She commented, in our later sessions, that while others knew more about her, she was finding out all kinds of things about her people that enabled her to work with them better. She was able to identify how to relate the current assignment to people’s aspirations, because now she knew what they were.

Once the company settled down and had its systems running smoothly, Gwen found that she was restless. She really didn’t enjoy coming into work that much. That was new to her. She felt a need to do things with her daughter, to run in the morning, to try new ways to use her business skills in combination, this time, with her now confirmed creative talents. When the company realized that it would have to retrench to withstand and survive the downturn in the telecommunications market, she volunteered to leave. No one wanted her to go, but she realized that the systems she established could be run by a controller, rather than a CFO, and that this was an opportunity to take time and recast her sense of her own abilities in a new light. As of when we met at that café, she had been out of her job, any job, for three months, and was just starting to put a picture together for herself.

IDEAS FOR DEVELOPING LEADERS’ CREATIVITY
It would take another article to fully describe the differences it makes to businesses when its leaders’ creativity is tapped. But you can envision how the increased interest in each other, the increased conversation and flow of communication can produce benefits. Trust, innovation, elevated energy and sustained contribution do flow from the coalescing of leaders’ creative expression. Business issues aren’t looked at in terms of managerial options versus resource constraints. They are looked at instead as opportunities to be creative, look at things afresh, and have conversations that really matter, for the life and sake of the business. These businesses end up being places that are fun to work in—even if they are a little bit crazy and chaotic at times.

How do business educators and executives support the creative practices of future leaders? Here are a few ideas for consideration:

1. Since business schools, especially many masters programs, assume leadership as a goal of their programs—and not just high level, executive management—they should have course requirements for graduate level work in literature, philosophy and/or history. I think a good background in physics and history of science would be helpful as well. These courses of study reflect on the various forms that this great human drama of ours has assumed through the ages. Graduate programs might even discourage applicants from taking business majors at the bachelor levels so they can take time to develop facility in these exploratory, critical disciplines.

Case studies on strategy, even on so-called “ethics,” are not sufficient. These courses simply rehash dilemmas in dealing with narrow business circumstances of distributing profit or pain. The real work of leading puts people in situations where they have to imagine and then create new relationships with stakeholders so that something new and exciting can take root, flourish and produce profits. The leader knowing how to take people through learning and creative thinking—learned from their own engagement in that kind of practice—expands the capabilities of everyone involved. Everyone in the company gets into the act of creating narratives of possibility and vision in which they can take a part and assume responsibility.

The courses we envision all support the kind of imaginative, narrative-creating, relationship-building actions that have relevance long before the tired and schematic case studies have any relevance.

2. After achieving certain levels of senior management rank, leader prospects should strongly be encouraged to take up non-business related creative practices, or increase the intensity of the ones they currently engage in. These practices would have certain requirements: they would involve a teacher of some sort; they would require constant practice and attention in order to make progress; infinite horizons of learning would be attached to these endeavors (one never reaches completion of them); they would involve imagination, persistence, practice and discipline to accomplish. And time during the business day—instead of lunch hours, or even just time taken off during the long hours they put in anyway—should be available for these pursuits (assuming many of these people will have demanding family obligations as well—and family life is an excellent leadership learning experience too, by the way; so time for family life should be required and demanded, not interfered with on a regular basis).

Of course, by the time senior managers have reached the upper ranks of a company, they are often inured to the kinds of professional narrowing that constricted Gwen. To correct for that, I recently conducted an experiment. I had a group of executives I was mentoring spend a day with the 6th grade students at a local private school whose curriculum centers around creative arts—drama, sculpture, painting, music, literature, community service. The idea was to completely immerse these executives in an environment where creative practice was taken completely seriously and was engaged in completely openly.

The results have been rewarding. The executives learned from these young innocents about what has been missing in their lives. “I haven’t spent two hours doing something completely artistic since I left…well, high school,” one executive said. “I’m going to take this up.” Others discussed whether or not creativity was in evidence in the workplace. They asked why making a living had to restrict creativity in their companies. For some, they vowed to listen to their young children more and encourage, appreciate and share creative energies with them.

3. Throughout a prospect’s career, ever better and clearer writing skills should be demanded—including having in-house writing courses being offered. I am talking about discursive essay writing in which topics are considered from several different perspectives, and elegance as well as clarity is demanded.

To help people to keep their creative energies fresh, I encourage my clients to read literature (not pulp fiction) on airplanes, or read excellent leader biographies (not hagiographic screeds about the latest business icon), and read high quality newspapers and magazines that are written with thought, depth and some elegance. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers come to mind. I encourage only the most selective TV watching or talk radio listening. The idea is to spend time with people who look at issues with care, attentiveness and concern for wide, social consequences, and who then write about these issues excellently. Those are the attributes we want our leaders to exhibit as they shape the products and services that so affect every aspect of our lives.

4. Mentoring for high potential prospects is a must. People such as Gwen who show great promise need to be given every opportunity to break through the barriers they have erected in order to fulfill their juvenile ideas of success. They need to heal the cutting they have done to themselves in order to secure a viable livelihood for their families. Mentoring that pays attention to the whole person, not just coaching that improves skills of various kinds, is an indispensable intervention that releases the vital energies people need in order to lead.

5. As Jim Collins, the author of Built to Last and Good to Great, rightly stresses, a business needs to operate in such a way as to realize its values, not just to produce products and services. Vision in leaders is always a matter of someone’s strenuous and determined efforts to have values of theirs put into operation in the world. The leader puts deeply felt values at risk, puts them to the test in order to have a bit of the world benefit from them—or, if need be, to learn what new values he or she needs to adopt in order to realize even higher ones for more people. By operating in order to fulfill values everyone in the company becomes involved with and contributes to the leading of the company.

Decisions that are taken are always talked about in terms of stories: how the decision will affect others lives, what those lives might look like, how people in the company can act so as to make these effects as positive, constructive and meaningful as possible. Creative practices are all about learning to create those stories. These practices are all about starting from one place and progressing to some other place—all with difficulty, all with focus, attention and discipline.

A SPECIAL OBLIGATION
Yes, I would offer, business people have a special obligation to cultivate their creativity. Businesses are places where people spend most of their waking hours; businesses are the means by which most of the important interactions in our lives transpire; businesses produce the products and services that we devote much of our income towards; businesses shape communities; businesses form the contexts in which people identify, name and hone their dreams. Most of all, businesses are the largest consumers of our leading talents. Ask yourself, how do places dominated by deadening processes affect the quality of life of everyone involved in that business? To get an answer, spend a day in the grips of the airline industry (as I frequently do in traveling to my clients’ sites), or in a government bureaucracy, or in a typical mass production factory, and see how you feel about the prospects of modern living after this experience. What must the people in those businesses feel about life’s prospects? What does this say about how those businesses are being led?

Why should businesses care about this kind of question? Because every business has many leaders, or at least one, and by far the majority of us in the US are directly or indirectly involved in businesses. So, it is in businesses that most of our future and current leaders’ full talents are envisioned and realized. We must run our businesses with the proposition in mind, in clear view, as a clear test of our commitment and seriousness, that leaders are business’ most important products.

Gwen is right. Just doing all the right things to get products and services out the door, to make our profits, to give our shareholders a return, is never enough. It is certainly not for leaders. They have to do more. They have to work hard, every day, to become the people who live life to the fullest. They must do this, I believe, because it is with these leaders that we share every day of our working lives. And so, in a large way, these leaders are the ones who can most help us realize whether what we are all doing, day by day, is worth the effort.

Michael Shenkman, Ph.D., is founder and president of the Arch of Leadership (www.archofleadership.com), a leader mentoring company. This article was adapted from his new book, The Arch and The Path, the Life of Leading Greatly (Sandia Heights Media, 2005).