Inspiring Employee Creativity

History, I argued in a prior article, suggests that technologies shape leadership. Today’s digital technologies, in addition to requiring companies to adopt culturally neutral leadership standards, are also forcing a reassessment of core leadership principles.

Prior technological revolutions largely enabled physical work to be done better, faster, cheaper. In contrast, digital technologies are making work increasingly thought-driven; at the core of good work are ideas, concepts, intellectual property, and symbols to be manipulated on computer screens. Consequently, unleashing people’s creativity and inspiring them to contribute must become a central goal of leadership.

The Dominant Leadership Types: “Controllers” and “Empowerers”

Two types of leaders dominate today’s work environment. “Controllers” prescribe standards, closely drive execution, analyze data that’s produced to progressively refine the standards, and evaluate people on their past performance. “Empowerers” prefer forward-looking discussions with direct reports. They use these to decide what work needs to be done.

Controllers run call centers that record every word and keystroke and require employees to refer to supervisors when issues unanticipated by their scripts arise.1 They see early virtual reality technologies as a tool for shortening training, minimizing on-the-job errors, and avoiding travel for meetings.2 They use dashboard tools to monitor individuals and tasks in real time, ignoring the fact that normal variation, endemic in nature, doesn’t require immediate corrective action.

Empowerers have begun emerging recently, often from industries that conduct high value-added, intellectual property-intensive work across the world. They operate in “connection and inspiration”4 environments that need employee development, rapid change, and teamwork.5 They found the Controllers’ approach problematic, as it often stopped them from prescribing precise goals beyond the short term. They also struggled to provide open-ended feedback that wasn’t conventionally positive or negative about issues in which their employees possessed greater expertise than they had. In response, they shed, or at least sharply changed, backward-looking annual performance reviews — considering them rigid, burdensome, and outdated artifacts — and replaced them with regular forward-looking conversations.6 Some use mobile apps to facilitate these discussions.

Neither of these approaches to leadership goes far enough. The real leadership challenge is that today’s digital technologies make work increasingly thought-driven, not muscle-powered.