I’ve been thinking for a while now about the key characteristics of creative leadership. It’s an important part of my role as a Creative Director and it’s a skill that I’ve developed over time having been responsible for many high profile projects and being exposed to diverse experiences in my day to day work. Currently I lead teams across different project areas. Each project requires a different creative approach due to a number of factors such as the scale of the project, the team itself, stakeholders, business objectives and audience needs. Good creative leadership has tangible results, and in practice its a skill that involves being able to draw on a variety of experiences and a particular way of thinking about problems. I think John Maeda sums it up really well in this example:
John Medea, president of RISD sets the Characteristics of the creative leader.
What I like about these characteristics is that its possible to draw on your own personal references to put them context. For example, “loves to learn from mistakes” is one characteristic on John Maeda’s list and I’m sure many people can reflect and think about mistakes that have occurred during their career. Making mistakes can be difficult but its a great learning process and gives you an experience you can draw on to do things better in the future.
Some of the characteristics have strong relationships to each other, for example enabling and encouraging teams to take risks at times requires you to lead the project like a ‘jazz ensemble’ and to get the best out of an iterative process its important to maintain an open and interactive environment where the team feel empowered to make decisions and create things quickly.
I think it’s important to bear in mind that John Maeda’s list is not a template that can simply be copied and then bang your a creative leader. All of these characteristics are informed by ways of thinking and doing things throughout your career. What I hope to do with a series of blog posts is to explore different facets of creative leadership putting some of John Maeda’s characteristics in context and also adding a few of my own. Hopefully it will provide an interesting overview of different techniques and approaches.
