The Creative Director Oxymoron
By: Julie Garland Mclellan
Tags: Governance, Strategy, Business, Board Of Directors, Creativity

We talk a lot about creativity in the boardroom. Every company claims to want a creative board. Every board wants to engender creativity in the executive ranks. Very few boards seem to manage this. With the possible exception of Qantas, most boards lack a marketing creative in the composition. Instead they draw their members from lists of the usual suspects; former CEOs — especially from that industry, a banker, an ex-audit partner, the obligatory lawyer, a major shareholder, someone with an Order of Australia. All very ‘establishment’; not very creative.

But is the boardroom environment one that would welcome and nurture creativity? A brief look at the way in which really creative work environments are organised gives some chilling insights into the reasons that boards’ desires for creativity may be unfulfilled.

Risk Tolerant

Creatives — to borrow a word from the advertising industry- are different in their approach to risk; they need to try the new, the novel, the untested. They know that is risky and still do it. They are prepared to fail and prepared for people to know that they failed. When they have tried and failed, they try again and, when they do eventually succeed they try something else to see how that goes.

Boards like to recruit directors with a track record of success. A director with a string of failures, albeit interspersed with spectacular successes, is just too risky to be put forward for shareholders to vote onto the board. Prudence is a desired characteristic. Tolerance of failures isn’t.

Risk management (making sure that failures aren’t fatal) can easily slip from optimising the risk reward balance to suit the risk appetite of shareholders to minimising the overall levels of risk to maintain the reputation of directors.

Unless the risk tolerant creative has founded the company and retains sufficient equity to safeguard their place on the board they will very likely be ousted in favour of more conservative candidates.

Openly Playful

Creatives have a strong sense of play. They like to jest; to model; to role play and to do things just for fun.

Boards are environments where dutiful diligence is the default modus operandi. Time is limited. The other directors are busy and important people. The executives have jobs to do and must only be taken from those and asked to attend the board when there are matters of importance to be seriously addressed. Agendas are crammed full of important items and taking time to enjoy a few moments of levity is a luxury that few boards will allow.

Directors learn to behave with utmost propriety and to treat all board business with serious and solemn effort. Creatives who poke fun at people or process are not welcome in the boardroom. Humour, if allowed, is droll, dry and wry.

Directors’ egos are sensitive. Status is hard crafted and easily lost. Tolerance for talk that might reduce the reputation of being a responsible solemn decision-maker is low. Creative play is discouraged lest anyone should see.

Challenging

As well as playfulness, creatives indulge in challenge. Challenging themselves. Challenging others. They challenge for the thrill of it. Even when they don’t need to. Envelopes are for pushing. Boxes exist for getting out of.

They are great at questioning the status quo and pushing for initiatives to expand and grow. They are also exhausting. It is wearing for executives to spend weeks working on a strategy proposal only to have a director query the underlying assumptions, interpretation, response and potential outcomes. The standard response of the creative to a new proposal is ‘how can you prove that?’

In the boardroom challenge can be taken very personally. Question someone’s assumptions and you are questioning their judgement. That judgement is their passport to the boardroom. Too much challenge can lead to a board that fragments or directors who are defensive and cautious in sharing insights or foresight lest it be harshly judged by a peer.

Boards need to act as a cohesive and consensual decision-making team; they need to be able to accommodate the management team within their own team at appropriate points and exclude them at others. Doing this is difficult. Doing it when one of the team members is continually challenging the others can quickly become impossible. Directors will rightly sense and exclude a personality that is too challenging for their sense of board unity.

The chairman has authority only because it is given by the other directors. It is often overridden. For short times during important discussions that is a good sign and most experienced chairs are accustomed to allowing their board to pursue discussions into unforeseen and unplanned arenas until the directors are satisfied that they have gleaned everything they wished. When one director is keener that the others to pursue lines of inquiry and question accepted facts it can be perceived as undermining the chairs authority; when that one director repeats this behaviour it can undermine the sensitive balance between consensual leadership and authority — usually leading to retaliatory action. There are few more convincing retaliations than permanent exclusion!

Space to Focus

As mentioned earlier, board meeting agendas are highly coveted turf and time is carefully allocated to the most pressing items. Usually the more important the item the earlier in the agenda it will be placed. That allows the board to focus and contribute more on these items than on their successors whilst they have energy to share[1]. Creatives need space to focus. Tine to investigate angles. An ability to take an issue off the table and return to it at a later date. That doesn’t happen in the context of time poor board decision-making.

Most boards attempt to ‘warm up’ the board on really big issues by providing background briefings and information sessions before a decision is called for. Once a paper is marked for board decision it is considered poor directorial practice to delay the decision. That practice doesn’t sit well with the creative brains desire to spend time allowing ideas to percolate and to investigate new and different angles.

Most creatives like to come up with their own ideas for solutions; most boards are presented with an array of other people’s ideas, already ranked and assessed and asked to endorse the most favoured idea on offer. When the board has to endorse the selection of A, B or C the last thing anyone wants is a director who thinks up D, E and F!

Put this creative preference together with the risk aversion and the preference for management to make a strongly reasoned argument for a ‘best’ solution and there is a real danger of conflict.

Empathetic

Fortunately many creatives are highly empathetic; their insights into the feelings and motivations of other people are frequently the source of their most commercially viable creations. They thrive in a team atmosphere where people are genuinely valued for their unique and diverse contributions. They will, however, suffer when arbitrary forces cause board composition to change; a proxy fund advising against the re-election of a director on grounds that have nothing to do with capability and everything to do with punishment of one individual for the failings of an entire organisation; a major shareholder forcing people onto or off a board; a contested election for a board seat.

Some observers claim that too much empathy is a disqualification; that it will lead to the empath being upset when board discussions are particularly robust. However most chairmen will agree that empathy is a much required trait and that, rather than rendering a director useless when emotions run high, it triggers directors to take extra precautions to re-establish strained relationships and strengthen the ties of collegiality and respect that should bind the board into a cohesive unit. For this process to work the board operating protocols must allow for social time where directors can invest in their relationships and/or for one-on-one contacts between directors in the intervals between board meetings. Unfortunately few boards, especially those of large listed companies, make that a priority.

Passionate Approach

Creative personalities imbue their work with a high sense of self. They bring passion to bear and care deeply and personally about the outcomes. That sits uneasily with the reasoned, fact based, financial rigour of most board discussions and decision-making. Few boards pursue a design-thinking based approach to decisions and apply a process where the structure allows and calls for emotional engagement with the topic. Many seasoned directors will find an emotion-based argument hard to follow, and even harder to justify in their preferred rational terminology.

Constructively Critical

In the boardroom criticism can be taken very personally. Question someone’s assumptions and you are questioning their judgement. That judgement is their passport to the boardroom. Too much challenge can lead to a board that fragments or directors who are defensive and cautious in sharing insights or foresight lest it be harshly judged by a peer.

Boards need to act as a cohesive and consensual decision-making team; they need to be able to accommodate the management team within their own team at appropriate points and exclude them at others. Doing this is difficult. Doing it when one of the team members is continually criticising the assumptions, work, or diligence of the others can quickly become impossible. Directors will rightly sense and exclude a personality that challenges their sense of board unity.

Extremely Curious

Nose in/Fingers out is the standard mantra of board operations. Some degree of separation between the board and operational matters is considered healthy. With a creative personality, especially when passion is aroused, it is often surprising to the other directors just how far in a nose can get!

“What would happen if?”, “how” and “why” are favourite questions. Open ended investigations for no purpose other than understanding or gleaning an insight are intensely exciting to the creative. Knowledge for its own sake is highly desired and when applied to a current issue (often by a creative link that is invisible to the other directors) can be valuable; unfortunately the agenda rarely allows time for the curiosity to be satisfied and other directors who have not thought through the sequence will often fail to appreciate the applicability of the insights.

What to do?

Does this mean that the lack of directors with marketing, HR, design and other creative backgrounds is destined to continue unabated? Not necessarily.

If your board is in need of greater diversity with a strong creative input then a few small concessions to refashioning the board environment to suit the preferred operating style of the creative will allow the transfusion of creative thought to take root and flourish. Building workshops for creative engagement into every third board meeting, bringing in a professional facilitator, allowing time for social interaction and site visits and making sure that all contributions are acknowledged will help to establish a “creative-friendly” environment. Better yet — those same changes might be conducive to greater creativity from the existing directors.

Julie works with boards and directors to increase their impact

By Julie Garland Mclellan

Julie Garland McLellan is a professional company director and corporate governance consultant. She is the author of the “Director’s Dilemma” newsletter, “Presenting to Boards”, “Not-For-Profit Board Dilemmas: Practical Case Studies for Directors in the Non-Profit Sector”, “Dilemmas, Dilemmas” and “All above Board: Great Governance for the Government Sector”.

Julie undertakes board and director appraisals; her in-boardroom education is characterised by a practical approach using real-life scenarios to build rich interactive learning experiences.

She facilitates difficult meetings with tact and vigour; her guidance behind the scenes has helped many boards, CEOs and chairmen to turn difficult situations into successful outcomes.

[1] For a full discussion of managing directors’ energy within a planned board agenda see chapter 2 pages 31–35 of ‘Presenting to Boards’.