Cultivating Creative Leadership

*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

EMG-POD-20241107-CULTIVATING CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Bill Berthel:
Welcome to The Get Emergent Podcast. The Get Emergent Podcast guides leaders to creatively strengthen relationships and improve their performance with their leadership and those that they lead. We like to provide some concepts and ideas you’re going to be able to turn into pragmatic experiments and that they’ll help you to develop higher potential in your work and your leadership. And we hope that you’ll find some better practices to apply in your work. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone:
And I’m Ralph Simone. And I was intrigued by the intro. I guess sometimes I don’t always listen to it, but the creative ideas, I think that’s really the topic of this podcast, is how to be more creative as a leader.

Bill Berthel:
We. Do you like how we snuck that in there? Huh?

Ralph Simone:
I do. Oh, so you change. Maybe you changed it.

Bill Berthel:
Oh, no, no, no, no. I was. I wasn’t outing you that you hadn’t heard it in the past. It’s been in there. It’s one of our values that Emergent. Right. But we want to talk today about these three components of creativity. And you know, Ralph,  if I’ve had a nickel for every time I’ve talked to a leader saying, but I’m not a creative person. Right. I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ralph Simone:
Absolutely.

Bill Berthel:
Usually couch creativity in some art form. Right. Like, I can’t draw. I don’t paint, I don’t play music. There’s so much more to creativity than those obvious spaces.

Ralph Simone:
We look at it many of us, and I think I would include myself from time to time, look at it very narrowly.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah.

Ralph Simone:
And it’s applying this creativity to any facet of life or leadership that we’re going to be talking about today.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think leaders can learn a lot from those types of creative professionals. The artist, the musician, the writer. But if we’re not identifying as creative to begin with, that might be the challenge to see that we can be creative. Broaden that. I like the way you said we look at it in a narrow way. Really broaden the creative scope.

Ralph Simone:
Well, it’s really about mindset, because if we see ourselves as being creative, we almost are unfrazzled by anything that comes our way because we can deal with this unplanned event in a very creative fashion. And I think for me, mindset matters in this discussion, really does.

Bill Berthel:
And this topic often comes with an, important question of is creativity this innate gift? Are they just creative or naturally creative people? Or can it be taught? Can creativity be learned? And the answer is, both/and, it’s yes, and yes. There are some innate gifts that some people have in this space, and it can absolutely be learned or taught. Creativity is something that can be learned or taught.

Ralph Simone:
I think it’s interesting to me how much the and conjunction plays. We’re too quick to speak in terms of Or either I have it or I don’t. And either it’s innate or it’s learned. And I think when we can say it’s both. And certainly some people probably have more innate skills for certain things than others, but that doesn’t mean that we all can’t learn it. So I love this conjunction of And almost in any discussion we have.

Bill Berthel:
Absolutely. We’re going to learn a little later in this podcast that there’s some significant studies that show that most adults have unlearned the creative components, these three components that are required for creativity. We’ve actually unlearned them that children are much more creative than adults, typically speaking.

Ralph Simone:
Well, I’m tempted to be creative and go off script at this point. So let’s come back to what the three areas of creativity are before I take us off point.

Bill Berthel:
So the first one is a mindset. You nailed that. It’s skills of creative thinking. Right. We often think of creative thinking as a mindset or as a set of skills. And that first one, we really want to talk about these skills, the kind of soft skills of thinking differently, looking for combinations and relationships that have not yet been fully explored. Right. So you’re curious. You’re seeking different things, different combinations, looking at things upside down, inside out, picking things apart to put them back together. Kids do this, Right?

Ralph Simone:
No, no, no. I love where you’re going with this because I remember people who don’t think they can draw, and I think it was Betty Friedan who. Who said that. Have them draw the picture upside down and with their opposite hand. And I think what happens is you start to suspend judgment. You start to actually go with it a little bit more. The other thing you said, and I want to make sure we underscore it, is creativity can come up in combining things, utilizing unrelated stimuli to trigger ideas in a different space. I mean, this is often why when I’m looking for new ideas, I go grocery shopping with no cart. I walk around the store, the place that I’m comfortable, but it also has just this unrelated stimuli to what we do in our business, and it triggers ideas for future blogs or podcasts.

Bill Berthel:
So what I love about the way you frame that is it’s actually seemingly unrelated because you’re creating the relationship through your creativity of taking a walk and being open to that. Right. Within creative thinking there’s also a degree of flexibility. Right. So we have these skills of creative thinking, but we need to be. Or our creativity is best served by some flexibility in our thinking. Right. So creative types tend to be a little bit more agile in their mental models and thinking and it requires typically suspending judgment. I think you already shared that. Staying open and looking for new ideas or discerning ideas, not judging those ideas.

Ralph Simone:
Not sure where this idea comes from. But open to everything, attached to nothing. It’s mantra I like to keep in mind to support my creativity muscles.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah. I love it. And still within creative thinking is imagination. We’re talking about three components. Inside this first component of creative thinking. We have the skills of creative thinking. We have the degree of our flexibility. We also need imagination. Being more creative is allowing things that yet to exist exist in the mind first. Right. Every creation is made at least twice first in the mind and then maybe second iteration is something manifesting physically. We also need to give ourselves permission to see something possibly better or different in the future so we can imagine it and imagine it better or different in the future.

Ralph Simone:
And I noticed in some of my leadership development coaching when I ask someone to imagine something, many people initially struggle. So at some point we’ve turned off or corroded the connection to our imagination.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah, I love it. I like corroded the connection because it’s probably more of what happened or atrophied that connection more than actually completely lost it. The second component in creativity is expertise. I think some people can attach here a little bit more readily because they feel like they might have expertise in their field. Right. So this is where they differentiate the soft skills from creative thinking to more hard skills of technical knowledge in this HBR article of the three components of creativity. And so this is those harder skills, if you will, of expertise. It’s real knowledge, it’s experience. Sometimes we call this the book smarts I’m making right now. Right. Yeah. I used to work with professional artists and the one thing that separated them from, I’ll say like the hobbyist was their in depth knowledge of the materials they used. They had a technical expertise of the chemistry of the physical components, like that level of a scientist. Right. How these materials behave so they could truly manipulate them and control them in different ways. Right. They had an expert knowledge of the materials that they were using in their studio.

Ralph Simone:
But it seems like that expert knowledge either gives you permission or allows you to explore creativity. You know, I was thinking about a Covey quote around planning, which I think is related. He said, if you want to get spontaneity in your life, get yourself scheduled. And I, I look at this expertise the same way. I mean, I think in front of a group, I can be very creative. But I think what allows me to do that is the expertise I have in the topics. I’ve been at it a long time. I’ve read a lot of books, I’ve studied a lot of authors, I’ve connected a lot of models. And I think that expertise allows me more freedom to be creative.

Bill Berthel:
So I think you just connected it to leadership. So I think leaders can take a cue from this space of their technical level of expertise is one thing. You know, whatever field they’re in, if they’re in engineering, if they’re in law, if they’re in medical, health care, their technical expertise is one thing here that may not necessarily be the expertise we’re talking about for their leadership. Their expertise in leadership, Right? So some of that is the discipline of their, schedules, of their time. Some of that is the discipline in having very effective communication. Some of that is the expertise in building teams, in being agile themselves. And so for leaders, we can get more creative by having the expertise in leadership, not just the field in which we’re in, the widget we make or the service we provide.

Ralph Simone:
Excellent. No, I love that. What’s the third area?

Bill Berthel:
So this third area is motivation. Right? There needs to be kind of a want or a desire here to be creative. Right. The HBR article that we’re referring to divides this one in two spaces. And these are pretty common motivation theory spaces. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Right. The intrinsic motivation is what the creative leader wants to manifest. They have this, like, inside desire. It’s possibly shaped by the environment. Mostly it’s from the inside. It’s a want or a need. It’s a vision they have, it’s an idea they have. When the creative process ends with the desired result, the intrinsic motivation is then supported by these feelings of satisfaction, fulfillment and accomplishment. Right? That’s the dopamine hit our brain gets when we actually created the thing we had the vision for. But this intrinsic motivation is a desire, a want, usually from some type of need, perhaps in the organization or on the team they’re leading.

Ralph Simone:
Interesting. You know, this is somewhat connected to what we talked about earlier, but how do we lose this? Right? Because I think we open this up that many people as kids have maybe, even though they might not have the expertise, they seem to have some of the skills as well as the motivation for creative thinking. In particular, the imagination. And I’m just wondering what contributes to that connection being corroded over time.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah, I love it. I like corroded. I like atrophied. Right. There was a, George Land is fairly famous in this space of looking at motivation and creativity. He had a NASA study in 1968. NASA wanted to have their engineers and their teams become much more creative. So they were interested in understanding just that. What’s getting in the way, what’s blocking that, what has atrophied creativity with these, adults. So George Land studied this again in 1968. And what he learned was that we as adults unlearn these creative components or these creative necessities in our work and in our life. It’s largely due to the kind of rules and regulations and the compliance that it’s very necessary we learn as adults. Right. To be successful. We become, it’s not that creativity doesn’t have rigor, but we come maybe too rigorous. We, too structured perhaps we become too compliant, but very successfully. Right? So it’s a bull band again. Right. We learn to be able to navigate life successfully in society this way. But one of the unintended consequences is a loss of the innate creative skills we might actually be born with that we see in children.

Ralph Simone:
Well, it’s interesting, reminds me of the Buckminster Fuller quote that every one of us comes into life as a genius, and then life degeniuses us. And I think. I think it was. It’s interesting to me this both/and. So yesterday, talking to my daughter before she headed back to New York City, she works with a large public accounting firm and she was talking about her time sheet. So in those firms you have to account for all your time. And it’s. There’s a good reason for that. And I think all of that compliance constricts creativity. Taking a look at it, it was reminding me of when I started this business over 30 years ago, there were two things we weren’t going to have. Time sheets and expense reporting. Now as we get a little larger, there’s got to be room for and. But my thinking was we’d spent more time worried about where we charged our time as opposed to being creative with the time we were charging. And so I think it’s balancing that.

Bill Berthel:
It is balancing that. It’s very much, again, a both and right. Or managing those polarities or those creative tensions. This is a beautiful segue back to that third component of motivation we talked about, intrinsic. There’s also extrinsic motivation from the outside. Right. One of the reasons we lose some of this as we mature, as we grow to become adults, is we’re no longer rewarded as much for our creativity. Now this is starting to turn back around because we’re understanding this better. And there’s some great evidence in many schools where creativity is being rewarded, right. That external recognition, the recognition from your environment or your, you know, in a school setting, your teacher or your professor, Right? That’s important that it’s valued. We’re validated for our creativity. So this extrinsic motivation is tangible in rewards, right. It’s whatever it is in school, a good grade. At work, it might be, promotion or whatever recognition structures are in your organization for creativity.

Ralph Simone:
So I would tie this one to a recent conversation we had about failing fast or learning fast. And so the extrinsic motivation that I think is not as evident in many organizations is we do not celebrate learning or failing. And so that causes people to be less imaginative, less creative, less innovative.

Bill Berthel:
And I love that you just said you landed on innovative there, Ralph,  because I think we sometimes think that innovation is really for, what, the lab or the research and development group, Right? That’s where the innovation happens. We have an opportunity to innovate in our leadership as well. Right. Really differentiate our leadership through the creative competencies that we can bring, not just those more technical competencies.

Ralph Simone:
And we also have the ability to differentiate within the functional areas. There is creativity in accounting. I remember one of my intermediate accounting professors in college said that there is a difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. One is against the law, but one is a creative act. And I think, you know, in each function that we lead, how can we get more creative in reducing the cycle time, eliminating the waste so that we make more of an impact on the customers that we serve?

Bill Berthel:
Yeah, I love it. So I think we can get a little self reflective and look at these three components and decide if there’s a gap in one of these we’d like to develop. Right. Is there, an effort gap perhaps in motivation? What would be an effective driver or motivator for me to become more creative in my leadership? Maybe there’s a skill gap, maybe there’s something in my leadership development that I could really get some training on or some coaching on. Right. And then overall, we want our ideas to manifest into high quality things that we can share. Right. We want to Make a positive contribution. And sometimes we’re not happy with our creativity because there’s actually a quality gap when we’re done, when we create the thing and we feel like it’s not enough, there’s a continual improvement process. Right. We can learn how to make that quality better for the next iteration.

Ralph Simone:
I love that. I think the other potential gap could be a process gap. We need to have time to be creative.

Bill Berthel:
Oh, absolutely.

Ralph Simone:
We need to have space. It’s sometimes difficult to be creative upon demand.

Bill Berthel:
Absolutely. It’s the famous 3M, story. Decades ago, the leadership at 3M provided 20% of every engineer’s time as kind of untethered creative time. It wasn’t billable time. And one of the famous outcomes of that is actually the post it note, the sticky note. It would have never happened. That wasn’t a structured project. It was a creative actually mistake that they were looking for adhesives to make a better just notepad. It was a creative failure. Right. it had that kind of untethered time in their process not been allowed, it would have been just rejected as a failed attempt to make an adhesive. Instead, a, curious engineer said, well, how could this be used? Would somebody want a repositional piece of paper? How many Post IT notes are sold? I have no idea how many post IT notes are sold.

Ralph Simone:
And if I recall the story, he actually figured it out through, using it temporarily to mark a page in a music hymnal at church.

Bill Berthel:
Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah.

Ralph Simone:
So that, so the unrelated. Right. Stimuli that allows that to happen I think is fantastic. I mean I’ve probably told you this and we probably share a love of driving, but I think some of my most creative ideas occur when I’m in the car.

Bill Berthel:
Absolutely.

Ralph Simone:
Away from the work. Away from the work. And something occurs to you because there’s time and space. Distance.

Bill Berthel:
I am so thankful for hands free recording technology because now when I have an idea in the car, I can just record that with, you know, my voice safely instead of keeping the old pad and pencil on the passenger seat and taking a note while I’m driving. That’s probably not a good idea.

Ralph Simone:
Well, then that’s probably not a good idea that I share how I still do it. So we’ll, we’ll move on from that. So what would we challenge our listeners to think about as a first step or next step in enhancing their creativity?

Bill Berthel:
So one of my favorite ways of being a little bit more creative is asking myself, what might I have unlearned here. And then I go to, what would a child see differently? What would a young person see differently here? That’s not about ageism. That’s about recognizing that we unlearn creative skills and creative components like creative thinking. So I like to think about, you know, what would a child or younger person do with this.

Ralph Simone:
And actually spend more time following children in conversation as opposed to leading the conversation. It kind of reminded me of a story when we were taking our first golden to training. Right. We were learning how to train the dog. And we went to a dog trainer. And my nephew, I think he, who’s he’s in his 30s now. I think he was 4 at the time, said uncle Ralph,  is Decker, our dog’s trainer  a dog. And they, come to think of it, they do use dogs to model. But, you know, and instead of thinking, what a ridiculous question, what a wide open question. And, it could lead to. Maybe that’s how they led to. How do we use dogs as the role models or to train other dogs in their behavior?

Bill Berthel:
Oh, absolutely. I love that. I love that. What do you do to stay open and creative, Ralph?

Ralph Simone:
Well, I think the one thing, and I’ve been working on this for a long time, is to balance judgment with curiosity. To really just to be curious. And I’ve taken this a little bit further. Not to be curious about someone’s position necessarily, although that helps, but to be curious about how they might have gotten there. And it seems to soften judgment, which then creates this openness to possibility. And that’s creativity in interpersonal relationships.

Bill Berthel:
So becoming a more creative leader will not only set you apart from others in a good way, but, it’ll add value to your leadership so that you can be much more effective, innovative, and really be seen as a whole brain leader. And so we’re asking our listeners to consider where might you get more creative in your leadership? Ralph,  thanks for this.

Ralph Simone:
Thanks, Bill.

Bill Berthel:
We hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’re looking forward to more. You can listen to a new podcast two times every month here at Get Emergent or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks for listening.