Again, those who came up with creative ideas were viewed to have significantly less leadership potential than those who simply came up with a useful solution. To be sure that this wasn’t just a personality issue – that somehow the creative people were coming across as less likable – Mueller’s team also asked questions about how competent and warm the idea pitchers were. That revealed that both groups were viewed as being equally warm and competent. So the problem was simply the presentation of a clever idea, not a perceived personality defect.
According to Mueller, these findings are consistent with how people have traditionally defined business leadership in the past. “The value that leaders have for groups is in creating common goals so the group can achieve something,” Mueller notes. “And goals are better the clearer they are – you don’t want uncertainty. So leaders need to diminish uncertainty and create standards of behaviour for everyone in the group. And they create those standards by conforming to them.”
She contrasts that thinking with how people describe a creative person. Other academic literature has found that when people are asked what comes to mind when they think of a creative person, “in addition to ‘visionary’ and ‘charismatic,’ people also use words like ‘quirky’, ‘unfocused’ [and] ‘nonconformist’. The fact is people don’t feel just positively about creative individuals – they feel ambivalent about them.”
Of course, Mueller says not every organisation fails to promote creative types. Some firms, like IDEO and Apple, are specifically geared toward nurturing creativity and valuing innovation; the value of those qualities is ingrained in their culture, Mueller states, not just something that is given lip service by the top brass.
To show this, Mueller and her colleagues performed a third study. In this case, they took a group of 183 students at a large Northeastern university and broke them into two groups. The first group was primed to think about leadership and charisma together by being asked to list five attributes that define a charismatic leader. “When you have the word ‘charismatic’ activated in your mind, you may be thinking more along the lines of creativity,” Mueller notes.
After listing those attributes, the group was given a story about a person voicing an idea, again for how an airline could generate more revenue from passengers. Half the group was given the story with the individual putting forth a useful, but not novel, idea for solving that problem while the other half were given the story with the person coming up with a creative and useful suggestion (in this case, it was to charge for online gaming during the flight). They all were asked to rate, on leadership potential, the person who came up with the idea. In this case, the group exposed to the creative idea rated that person as having higher leadership potential than the group whose story contained someone putting forth just a practical idea.
But what if people were not thinking specifically about charismatic leaders? The second group out of that same pool of 183 students was not primed to think about charisma and leadership together. They were simply asked to list attributes of a leader; the word ‘charismatic’ was not mentioned. Then these students were broken into two groups and put through the same exercise of rating either a creative idea or just a useful one. In this case, the results were the opposite of the first group studied – they ranked the leadership potential of the person who had a creative idea below that of the individual who simply came up with a useful idea.
Debunking stereotypes
According to Mueller, this study points to the conflicting feelings that people often have around truly creative thinkers. In the paper, she and her co-authors write that leaders who are the most original may be overlooked “in favour of selecting leaders who would preserve the status quo by sticking with feasible, but relatively unoriginal solutions.”
They suggest that the reality created by this bias could explain why the IBM survey of leaders found that many expressed doubt or a lack of confidence in their ability to take charge in times of complexity. Those leaders were ostensibly promoted “based on this prototypical perception of leadership and now find themselves in a world that has vastly changed, one that requires much more creative responses and thinking.”
That means that companies need to “debunk the stereotypes” against creative people, Mueller says. “The fact is, some people are selected for a leadership [track], while others are not. So companies need to think about this issue, and their performance appraisal systems should be changed accordingly. Managers need help in understanding what stereotypes they might have in their minds and how to overcome them.”
The key is how companies view the traits associated with creativity. “There are some cultures where it is less of a problem than others,” Mueller notes. “The question is, ‘How do you think about descriptions like ‘quirky’ and ‘unfocused’? If those traits are viewed only negatively, then you have more of a problem.” It is important for firms with that view to examine these biases because “many companies want to be creative and they just don’t know what they are doing wrong. Diagnosing that you are one of those companies is the first step in solving it.”
Of course, Mueller is not arguing that every quirky, creative whiz is suited for a corner office. “Leaders require multiple skills, and creativity is just one of them,” she says. “Some creative people don’t have all those skills. But the challenge is to recognise those who do.”
