Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 13

Shifting Keys: Leadership as Envisioning and Interacting

The key distinctive role of leadership at the outset is that leaders take the initiative. They address their creative insights to potential followers, seize their attention, spark further interaction. The first act is decisive because it breaks up a static situation and establishes a relationship. It is, in every sense, a creative act.

James McGregor Burns

Burns' definition above is a classic, and well worth referring back to. Strategic leaders do provide a creative spark and they build relationships. But a critical difference between the context within which Burns wrote and now is that today's leaders must do more than address their creative insights at followers, they need to be able to follow and weave the creative sparks of others. They must act in the middle, as a conduit for sparks, as well as a maker of them.

Leading from the middle is our fifth leadership key – we use it to describe the shift between the different leadership styles we have described in the previous chapter. Specifically, the ‘shift key’ of leading from the middle allows the leader to toggle between ‘envisioning’ (mapping and sussing a vision) and ‘interacting’ (linking and promoting with ideas and perspectives inside and outside the organization). This connection between envisioning and interacting is articulated by two other modern leaders. Terry Leahy, CEO of supermarket giant Tesco, claims that leadership to him ‘means enabling people ...