Leaders and Artists: Are they really worlds apart? Part 2

By Brian Woodward and Colin Funk

Leadership is typified as much by its artfulness as its skill and competency. Most of the basic skills required for success in a leadership role can be gained through competency-based programs and personal experience. However, something more than skill is required and this extra something sets apart great leaders from average leaders and provides the means for responding to the profoundly dynamic environment that characterizes the leader’s world. This something extra is what makes leadership more of an art than a science.

This something extra can be developed by enhancing a leader’s aesthetic capacity through artistry and art. Art is enchanting and arrests our attention. Art allows us to read our own experiences and draw on qualities of personal character, often from a deep source. Once attention is arrested, imagination is invoked. Exploration and discovery begin. Imagination emerges into the world through artful expression and is made visible and meaningful through processes of crafting. The effects of artful expression and crafting produce ramifications in the lifeworld of the leader, so the artful leader develops a sincere cultural sensitivity and ecological sensibility. This insight has motivated us to explore emerging capacities that leaders will need to meet the demands in a world context that shows multiple paths but few clear signposts. This is a work in progress, and using the elements of aesthetic process we have begun to identify a number of emerging capacities.

Exploring Key Emerging Capacities

The following emerging capacities reflect core abilities for the leader and provide the necessary means for full expression of leadership. These capacities represent a cluster of abilities that reflect some of the basic requirements for effective leadership.

1. Enchantment – Arrested Attention

The capacity to let oneself pause, notice, reflect, feel, and move into the moment. This is essential in any artist – the ability to feel wonder and awe. This capacity reflects the artist’s facility for finding fascination, allure, and attractiveness in everyday events and things. The ability to fantasize and to be seduced by things of the world is also included. For a leader, this means the willingness to be entranced and arrested by a moment, a scene, a phrase, an event. And once enchanted, the ability to notice what most others do not notice and to see the significance of the moment or event.

2. Invoking the Imagination

The capacity to see something that is not real or present. To work with imagination and to use imagination as a personal resource. To read deeply into events, people, and stories to find hidden or deeper meaning. To see new possibilities and paths. The capacity to think metaphorically, and read life experiences for their meaning provides the basis for deep exploration and is an essential element for sense-making – a key leadership capacity.

3. Crafting

Crafting is about making something or bringing something into being – bringing personal expression into daily life. Both artists and leaders develop their craft albeit on different canvasses. The craft of the leader is to create conversations which require the capacity to live intentionally with mindfulness and deliberation. This capacity includes the effort to consciously express oneself, often with a degree of artistry and personal character. It requires thought and reflection as well as a style of spontaneity that captures and expresses the leader’s personal character. Leaders craft conversations that not only show commitment and purpose but also demonstrate authenticity and faith.

4. Lifeworld Responsiveness

The environment in which the leader operates is a living, ecological system made up of nature, people and their networks, material things, organizations, etc. The required capacities are twofold: first, the ability to remain unique in a world that uses culture to normalize, and second, to draw from and give back to the environment that nourishes them. This capacity is about finding a way of engaging in the lifeworld to gain its opportunities and riches without losing one’s uniqueness. This capacity is about leaders developing an ecological sensibility and crafting their actions with knowledge of the intended, as well as unlikely, consequences.

Growth of the Leader

Methods used by artists from a wide range of art forms and disciplines are proving extremely valuable in helping leaders develop that something extra. Leaders, like artists at The Banff Centre, are recognizing the value and the necessity of reaching that next level in their own development. Based on seven years of exploration and testing, new methods for leadership development have been adapted from processes artists use to develop themselves.

New programming developed at The Banff Centre’s Leadership Learning Lab builds on and around this research and development. New programs, forums, and other events bring together master artists and business leaders in an environment that focuses on developing a number of emerging capacities through a multitude of aesthetic processes. A strong theme in this new line of programming is to focus on the growth of the leader through authentic expression, personal commitment, and a sense of purpose. Another theme focuses on the leader’s role as the builder and designer of the creative or generative space – a space in which others are creative and innovative. The following quote by Warren Bennis reflects this understanding that leadership, generative space, and creativity are all needed for developing leaders:

“There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.”

Brian Woodward, PhD, C.Psych. is trained as an Educational Psychologist and has worked as an organizational consultant for over 20 years. His work focuses on individual and team performance, individual and team assessment, organizational effectiveness, adult learning and development, and individual and group decision making and problem solving. Colin Funk is the Director of Leadership Development at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. He is a renowned speaker, lecturer, facilitator, writer, and program designer in the area of creativity, innovation, community development, and environmental education.