Three Executive Mistakes that Kill Creativity

Ask just about any senior executive these days what two or three organizational capabilities will be critical to their survival—let alone growth—in the next five years, and chances are good that creativity will be on the list. Yet in a recent survey of Fortune 500 CEOs, only six percent think their organizations are doing well when it comes to creativity.

In our decades of experience working one-on-one with senior executives and their teams, we’ve discovered that leaders themselves are often the ones to blame for their organization’s creative shortcomings. The bottom line is that senior executives, including the CEO, set the tone (or not) for a culture of creativity—both explicitly in terms of the priorities and expectations they set and implicitly by the signals their own personal actions send to others.

Here are three common mistakes that leaders make that can undermine creativity:

1. They focus too much on short-term results.
One of the core dualities confronting all leaders is the need to have both a strategic focus and an operational focus. (More on the leadership dualities model here.) How a leader manages the dynamic tension between the two determines how she balances positioning the organization for the future with getting results in the short term. The reality is that few leaders are able to combine the opposite approaches in a holistic way.

When leaders set performance expectations that are too focused on short-term objectives—such as quarterly numbers, landing the next big sale, the results of a semi-annual customer or employee engagement survey—or worse, when they themselves get too into the day-to-day operational details, they don’t leave room for big, bold thinking, in effect underplaying its importance and instilling a culture of short-term thinking.

Tip for Leaders: What gets measured and celebrated in an organization is what gets done. Establish innovative metrics for the creative outputs of the organization, and make sure those are extolled as much as more traditional measures of productivity.

2. They undervalue friendships at work.
Despite the glut of research findings by Gallup and others demonstrating the importance of social connections at work, in practice we still hear many senior executives say, “We’re not at work to make friends.”

The problem with this outdated leadership myth is that social connections matter to the brain. A lot. In fact, your level of relatedness to the people with whom you work has an impact on brain functions that are critical for creativity.  In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock writes, “just as the brain automatically classifies any situation into a possible reward or threat, it does the same with people, determining, subconsciously, whether each person you meet is a either a friend or a foe.”

When you sense a threat or perceive others as “foe,” that decreases the cognitive resources available for the overall executive function of your brain, inhibiting it from perceiving the more subtle signals required for insight or an “aha” experience.

Conversely, perceiving your work environment as largely friendly and encouraging not only frees up your cognitive resources for better thinking, it also enables you to see situations from novel perspectives. That engenders insight, broadens perspective and helps you to see more clearly your own thinking by observing through other people’s eyes.

Tip for Leaders: Create opportunities for colleagues to develop trusting relationships such as in small-group task forces and coaching programs, or by ensuring that team members share personal aspects about themselves through informal meetings, swapping bios, or on internal social networking sites.

3. They create an environment where people can’t speak up.
You know these leaders. The ones to whom you just can’t say “no,” even if that’s the right answer. Or the ones for whom you spend more time worrying about how to present an issue in a non-inflammatory way than you do thinking creatively about how to address the issue itself.

This kind of leader impedes creativity in many ways—by being irascible and verbally abusive thus creating a culture of fear, by monopolizing conversations to the point that there is no time left for other ideas to be presented or considered, by intentionally surrounding themselves with only yes-men who will carry the torch for the leader’s own ideas—but the result is the same: people stop talking and thinking for themselves.

Tip for Leaders:  Set aside time for your team to do nothing but tackle a pressing strategic challenge or opportunity and set the expectation that you want to hear from the team first.

© Kaplan DeVries Inc.