Urgency for the Creative Business Leader

 The art of business is experiencing a revolution.  As we freefall into the future of work, now is the time for purposeful reinvention of what it means to lead a business. Creative business leadership will meet this rallying cry. And there’s an urgency and audience ready for it.

I spent my childhood and young adult life in creative spaces: theatres, music halls, rehearsal studios. Transitioning to business, I suddenly found myself in conference and board rooms, across the table from senior legal executives. In this unfamiliar territory, I discovered that my value-add was not to perform for them but to co-create with them.

Consultations, like conversations, are inherently creative. We dance in the moment and improvise. We build on each other’s ideas, explore mutual interests and pressure-test each other’s beliefs. If we’re lucky, we stumble upon a creative moment of shared discovery, understand each other better, and form a real partnership.

Long before I studied techniques for building consultative partnerships, I had empathy. I observed. I tried my best to connect. Connection happened when the person across the table and I discovered a commonly held truth. Focusing on the relationship first, I accessed creativity to find that common ground. Sometimes what my company had to offer met their needs – but often it didn’t. I focused on being of value, which sometimes meant pointing them toward a different solution. Doing right by the client and building long-term trust was more important than landing any single engagement.

We are all in the business of relationship-building. Recruiting talent, leading people, selling others on our ideas – we need to form connection and persuade. For me, this translates to getting to know your audience by listening to cues: What does she care most about? What are the underlying challenges? What’s the impact of doing nothing? How will doing something different lead to better things for this person, as well as the company? We can build hypotheses about what our partners need, but if we don’t take the time to inquire curiously, listen intently, and validate our guesses, we miss valuable opportunities to build connection. 

Let’s be real for a minute, though. Building business relationships doesn’t always feel creative. There’s a discipline to it. The mechanics of managing a pipeline, committing to regular outreach and data capture can feel, well, formulaic and rigid. Innovation grows out of the balance between mastering a routine to create scalable patterns and fearlessly committing to experimentation.

Being a creative business leader is more urgent than ever. Challenges have emerged that never before existed – or at least weren’t previously brought to light. You can’t just show up and go through the motions. The good news is that innovation thrives during these times, and new products and services will surface not despite our challenges, but because of them.

In the midst of this change, we need business leaders who courageously bring their hearts and heads to co-build future solutions. Those who relish the challenge to try a new approach. Those with the bravery to be vulnerable, who admit to not having all of the answers but dare to discover them. We need partners to co-design a better future – even when it’s hard and uncomfortable. These are not normal times. Employees and business partners alike seek companies with a shared purpose, aligned values and a human approach.  They want business partners who will finally listen.