Managing Leadership^®

This is a pretty big topic. Often, innovation gets mixed up with it, but that’s okay for our purposes here, since the dialogue promoting these as leadership functions or essential traits of leaders is generally not overly particular about their scope or application in specific ways.

Creativity and innovation certainly are desirable in an organization. New ways of viewing everything from ordinary daily problems and processes to markets, strategic purpose - even the identity of the industry - can vastly aid productivity and profitability, and even help prevent decline. Similarly, innovative solutions and products, which often are themselves the result of creativity, enhance efficiency and can maintain market share and momentum.

But are they leadership functions? There is, of course, a great deal of argumentation that they are. These are universally regarded as highly desirable qualities. Moreover they have the additional attractive feature of being difficult to define, describe, or even identify.

Consequently, they make highly fertile ground for the most remarkable assertions. Few if any of these can be practically tested against the promises made for them as elements of leadership. But the two concepts (of leadership and creativity/innovation), both at once impossibly vague and deeply sought after, are inevitably combined in the minds of observers and practitioners alike.

But it is really not all that difficult to see that the concepts of creativity and innovation in an organizational setting, like those discussed on Wednesday, long predate the modern leadership movement’s frenzied efforts to lay claim to them. After all, when you look behind the glamorous façade erected to present these endeavors as those of leadership, you will see classic management tools and techniques, as always, hard at work.

For all that you call a process something that suggests elusiveness and transcendence, like “out of the box” thinking, what you really have is what used to be called simple brainstorming. Whether conducted individually or in a group setting, it is an effort not just to find new answers, but to ensure that the questions are properly understood - even appropriately formulated. Innovation can be seen as the procedural unfolding of the resulting insights operationally throughout the organization.

So, where does it come from? Here’s where the argumentation can get quite insistent that this sort of thing either issues directly from or is unleashed singularly by creative or innovative leaders. It certainly accords with the persistent libel that managers merely do, while leaders decide. The issue is further complicated by the fact that much creativity or innovation results in endeavors headed by owner/entrepreneurs, who are often singled out as the exemplars of individual leadership.

But this doesn’t alter any facts. When the ideas these persons convert into businesses are being generated, they are identifying and solving problems or generating better ways of meeting new or present needs.

Creativity and innovation are long-standing management functions, performed by managers, or by people who, in doing or facilitating them, are acting as managers. Whatever other delightful characteristics you may be looking for in a “leader,” when you’ve found these unique problem-solving abilities, you’ve found a manager. Count yourself fortunate.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of locating innovation, please see the article - What crisis? - from The Economist, explaining why the United States is still the world’s - well: leader in this area.

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