Mark Terry is Chief Vision Officer at NEO, the business creative agency he co-founded.
A creative director and consultant with 20 years’ experience, Mark has evolved NEO to be about more than developing original B2B communications. Shaped around the principle that creativity is a catalyst for connecting people with ideas, NEO acts as both a fractional and white label creative agency for PR companies among others. He also sits on the sits on the PRCA B2B Committee.
In this blog post Mark reflects on creative leadership and how to get the maximum from creativity and why, in order to get the most out of it, creative leaders need to shift perception of what creativity is.
I always find it intriguing how creativity is viewed by business. When I get asked into organisations as a consultant, I often hear something along the lines of, “We need the team to be more creative, we think it will make a difference to output.” At which point, my heart sinks. This objective totally misses the point of what a more creative team can achieve. Creativity has the potential to be a business differentiator.
But in order to get the maximum from creativity, there needs to be a fundamental shift in ideas about what creativity is, what it can achieve and how it is valued. This is where creative leadership comes in.
What is creative leadership?
Creative leadership is not all about outputs, but it does need to focus on results.
Creative leadership is about embedding a creative mindset and culture across a business. This isn’t something that can be forced. It’s about creating the right conditions for a creative culture to flourish. It involves breaking down siloes and overcoming the fragmented nature of modern business. It means promoting co-creativity and collaboration, so that creativity becomes part of a daily routine and second nature.
What can it achieve?
A creative culture means better, more robust ideas, enhanced capabilities, greater innovation and being seen to be innovative.
Ultimately, creativity can be a business differentiator. If you set the conditions for a creative culture, your organisation will not only be more innovative but will be seen as innovative by external as well as internal stakeholders as well – which can be business-critical. Additionally, by introducing a collaborative ethos, you should increase cross-team capability and extend skillsets almost by default.
NASA provides a great example of creative leadership with an R&D methodology that involves consulting with a wide variety of stakeholders, including those from disciplines outside its own field of knowledge. According to NASA, ‘Lateral expertise is now a central point for their open innovation.’
How should it be valued?
Creativity tends to be valued in terms of what we do. Creative leaders need to shift business thinking so that creativity is valued in terms of why we do it, which is less to do with physical outputs and more about generating a positive culture, enhancing overall performance and reputation.
Many businesses don’t value creativity sufficiently well or the value it creates. This isn’t necessarily their fault. They are looking at it through the wrong lens. Creative leadership involves helping businesses to recalibrate their ‘value apparatus’ and to think about creativity in terms of not what we do, but why we do it and what this provides. It’s a matter of being results-focused and explicit not only about how taking a more holistic approach to creativity can increase the certainty of business success but also how not choosing this approach increases the likelihood of failure. Crispin Manners espouses the virtue of this technique for positioning value in his book ‘How to Sell Value’.
To my mind, the fact that a creative culture can improve efficiency, productivity, wellbeing, reputation, and bottom line mean it should be seen as business critical. It just takes creative leadership to help it prove its case.
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