Creativity is a problem

…however much an organization officially celebrates out-of-box thinking, people are going to associate leadership and creativity the way they associate fish and bicycles. So being seen as a fount of innovation can be handicap for a leader. Unless you can trigger a different stereotype, by being exciting and inspiring.

Now here’s an interesting and somewhat disturbing report from Big Think on how we really think about and value creativity at work.  Drawing from some academic research the post summarises three different research projects which suggest that creativity and leadership appear to be polarised concepts.   Creative types suffer from the stereotype of eccentricity and unreliability according to the study conducted by Mueller, J., Goncalo, J., & Kamdar and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

People who had been primed to think about charisma saw more leadership potential in the candidate who had suggested an innovative idea. But those who had not thought about charisma went the other way: As a group, they saw the person with the uncreative idea as more leaderly.

It appears that the creative project

if you can pull off being charismatic, people will see creativity as a part of your leadership skills, rather than a detriment

There’s lots here to think about….