Gary Waddell 
Table of Contents
Leaders face a host of decisions and challenges on a daily basis, from daily demands for creativity and quick responses to broad and systemic challenges with complex, creative, and multi-faceted solutions. Rather than the absence of challenges, the beating heart of leadership lies in the habits of mind and skill sets that leaders bring to the problems they encounter. How one approaches the dilemmas they face says a great deal about them and often defines the depth and efficacy of the solutions one identifies.
Traditional leadership paradigms are grounded in a top-down, hierarchical approach. The lexicon of leadership too often highlights these leaders who lead from a positional authority, big personalities, and bold action. To be sure, there are still times when that kind of decision-making is called for when the building is on fire. For example, we need quick and decisive action rather than a lengthy design process.
For most leadership challenges, the best answers are much more nuanced and complex – and invite a very different kind of leadership responsibility. All of which begs the question – How does a leader guide a process grounded in empathy and creativity in ways that create solutions that address the thorny challenges that today’s leaders face?
Set the Stage for Collaboration
Leaders who loosen their creative muscles, lead teams in inquiry-based solutions, and set the stage for collaborative problem-solving are equipped to deal with the challenges that require our best imagination, collaboration, and creativity. While this can seem simple, the reality can often be much more complex. Creativity as a condition of leadership is not often touted as a primary focus. Creativity, at its heart, suggests understanding the problem at hand and then a process to gain input, prototype ideas, conduct small-scale tests and tweak the solution. Rinse and repeat.
Creativity invites a leader into the sometimes uncomfortable spaces outside the proverbial “box.” Creativity takes more time and can be a messier process than linear, hierarchical forms of decision-making. And therein lies the rub. Innovation resides in that messy space between the known/traditional and the possible. To suss out such spaces, creative leaders can ground their work in empathy-based solutions, seeking first to understand the problem of practice and the experience of those that a solution is designed to serve before jumping into solutions.
There are a few reminders that leaders should consider when engaging in creativity-centered leadership grounded in empathy and a design process:
- Decision-making happens best in environments that fail forward and encourage risk-taking in which teams are comfortable innovating and tinkering;
- Teams are made up of relentless collaborators who know how to disagree and share permission to risk new ideas;
- Requires courage – the most creative ideas are often risky and outside the norms of traditional ways that we have solved problems;
- Decision-making begins with empathy or employing a systemic process to deeply understand the lived experience of the solutions designed to serve.
Utilizing Empathy for Creativity & Leadership
This notion of empathy, or deeply understanding the lived experience of another, lies at the very heart of creative leadership. Too often, we think that we have the solutions that others need, certain that we understand the complex realities of customers, employees, or students. Employing a disciplined process of listening to others informs leadership in often profound ways. Designing solutions that meet an individual’s or group’s needs is a simple act, an ethic of leadership.
This article from Learning Forward provides some context around empathy interviews and their inherent power. This kind of empathy-based leadership requires humility in the leadership approach. That is a leader who understands that the wisdom of the group is often deeper and more grounded than that of an individual and who understands the leadership function as one of facilitation, as well as decision-making, is situated to lead into the creative solutions that the complex problems that face us today require. This grounding in a forward-thinking growth mindset sets the stage for creative approaches to perplexing problems of practice. Check out this EdCircuit piece on growth mindsets and creativity.
Leaders can subtly shift into creativity by implementing some leadership moves such as:
- Ask deep, open-ended questions to genuinely seek to understand another’s experience
- Identify a critical friend and thought partner with whom to explore strategies to engage in inquiry-based decision-making
- Embrace the messiness and risk inherent in engaging groups with divergent thinking on issues in conversation
- Use activities grounded in creativity to engage teams that are not accustomed to decision-making to engage a whole-brain approach to problem-solving and make space for their creative juices to flow.
- Be patient with yourself; as with so many things, creative leadership is less about finding the one right answer than it is about staying on a continuous improvement journey
Creativity is a central tool for the leader’s proverbial toolbox. We often think of creativity as the artist’s sole purview: the Picasso, Banksy, Alvin Ailey dancer, or philharmonic musician. It turns out that creativity is just as powerful a tool of leadership as it is for artists, and, used with intention and design, it can transform the systems in which we work and the impact of our work. And that is a good thing.
