PART TWO: TODAY’S
LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE,
HOWARD GARDNER AND
DANIEL GOLEMAN
Leading and Multiple Intelligences
Goleman: Howard, you had an unexpected fifteen minutes or more of fame with multiple intelligences, the theory you’re most closely identified with, when you wrote your 1983 book, Frames of Mind. Thirteen years later, I had the same experience with Emotional Intelligence, which was an unexpected attention-getter, too. There’s a very important connection between my work and your work, in that I consciously built on a path that you had laid, which was the idea that there are ways of being effective, of being intelligent, of producing a product which is valued, that have nothing to do with academic intelligences—with the verbal and math and spatial abilities that are cultivated in school. I took the theory of emotional intelligence (developed by Peter Salovey and Jack Meyer), and unpacked two of your seven intelligences: the intra-psychic and the interpersonal, self-awareness, self-mastery, and empathy and relationship skills.
However, there’s a very interesting distinction between how you have approached it and how I approached it. You’re someone who was there at the beginning of cognitive psychology. I remember your first book was really about cognitive science and you have looked at minds, and continue to look at minds, which is a cognitive lens. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to find a framework that would describe affective neuroscience. I’ve always been interested in the emotions, and so I was looking at the emotional level, and it seemed to me that our two theories are enormously complementary in that way. Have you thought about that?
Gardner: I think it’s a very good point. I remember initially, when I first read Emotional Intelligence, thinking, as you’ve implied, that this isn’t as cognitive as I think about things. One of the points I made at the end of my book about cognitive science is that it didn’t deal with context and it didn’t deal with emotions. They were both kind of taboo, and you were really ready to jump right into that water. I have to say that in that sense you were more prescient, because while you may have had intimations of affective neuroscience in the mid-1990s, it’s of course become huge in the succeeding period. And this is something with which I’m quite satisfied, but it’s not something that was on my radar screen.
And the other thing is I’m always asked about the relationship between our theories, and it’s too boring for me to say, “Well, I think it’s great,” so I always point out that I try very hard to be completely neutral about how intelligences are used, so if somebody has a lot of interpersonal—or to use your term, social—intelligence, they can use it to manipulate people, or they can use it to mediate and to get them to cooperate. And I think when you write about emotional and social intelligence, there is, I would say, a patina of positivity about it, even though I’m sure you recognize that people can use them in manipulative kinds of ways.
Goleman: Actually when I wrote Social Intelligence, which is an interpersonal domain, I had a chapter on the dark triad: narcissists, Machiavellians and sociopaths. And, as I think you’ve pointed out, the distinction is ethics. You have an ethical rudder, or not. And that gets us to leadership and the need for an ethical rudder. One of your minds in your Five Minds book is an ethical mind. Do you see that a sine qua non for a leader?
Gardner: When I wrote about multiple intelligence initially, I took great care not to confound the kind of people I wanted us to be with the way the intelligences worked, so then in my more recent work called Good Work, I’ve atoned for this, because a person can’t be a good worker unless they are ethical. When it comes to leadership, you have the same fault line. Any history of the twentieth century would have to consider people like Hitler, Mao, and Stalin extremely effective leaders that got their way. They changed history. But if your definition of leader involves what it means to be a good leader, in the sense of a leader we want to have, then the absence of an ethical compass is a disaster. I don’t think we can afford to have a lot of ethics-free leaders anymore, because the stakes are so enormous.
Goleman: Absolutely. Can you tie that back to the multiple intelligence framework? Which of those intelligences are most germane to ethical leadership?
Gardner: Well, I think that leaders in general need to have linguistic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, some intra-personal intelligence—you and I could argue about that—and what I call existential intelligence. Linguistic intelligence, because being able to tell your story effectively is important. Interpersonal because if you have Asperger syndrome you have significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication. You’re not going to be effective. You have to have some understanding about yourself, but I’m not sure you need to be obsessive about it. I think Ronald Reagan was a very successful leader who didn’t spend any appreciable time trying to probe his psychic depths. Then existential intelligence, which is kind of honorific intelligence—it doesn’t really pass my eight criteria, but it’s an interesting one to think about.
Existential intelligence is the ability to deal with big questions and help people find meaning in their lives, and whenever we talk about leaders who go beyond the managerial category, leaders who actually move people to do and think and behave in ways they wouldn’t before, they need to be able to give us a view of the big picture. What’s it all about? Where are we going? And so on.
Now, the truth is you could have all of those intelligences and still be a real bastard, I mean you know, Reverend Jim Jones moves people but moves people to get them to kill themselves. That’s existential intelligence, so the ethics is where you say to yourself, “What’s the right thing to do in the long run?” and “What’s the right thing to do in a transparent way?” So you aren’t doing it secretly, but you’re open about it, and if you both think about the long run and are transparent about it, it’s very hard to be unethical. The difficult thing, I believe—and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this—is in contemporary society we have to occupy roles that we didn’t evolve to be able to occupy. One role is the role of a worker in the sense of being a professional—a doctor, a lawyer, accountant, journalist, whatever—and the other is a role of the citizen. And not being somebody who lives in the neighborhood, but somebody who has to deal with how do you vote for your city, your state? And since we now can bring disease or pollution to the rest of the world, what kind of a global citizen are you? We can’t rely on the Ten Commandments or on the Golden Rule to tell us about what it means to be a good professional, what it means to be a good citizen, so I make a very sharp distinction between neighborly morality and actual ethical dilemmas. For example, say Dan and I live on the same block and play football with one another. How do we deal with one another? Well, we’ve got a lot of help from evolution on that. But then what happens when I’m a doctor or teacher and I’m faced with a very difficult ethical dilemma, or when I’m voting on some kind of a candidate, or some kind of a resolution, or deciding whether I should undertake a business which might ultimately have negative impacts? These are ethical issues, and we don’t have a lot of help with those.
So in the book I recently wrote, I discuss the need to create a commons. And by that I mean an area where people who are in the same profession, or people who are citizens in the same polity, can actually talk about the ethical dilemmas that we encounter. What we did, where things went wrong, what we might do better next time.
Goleman: Could that be done in an organization or a company?
Gardner: Of course. And with the Internet, it could be done with any group that you want. I think organizations especially need to heal themselves, and unless people are honest and transparent about the problems and how they try to deal with them—recognizing they don’t always do a good job, but maybe they’ve learned some lessons, and maybe some other people have learned some other lessons. I mean, you worked for many years for the New York Times. The New York Times has got lots of problems with it, but it’s certainly a professional organization, and over the hundred-plus years of the New York Times, there have been dozens and dozens of lessons that people have learned about what to do when something goes wrong—when you get a story wrong, when you misquote somebody. And ever since the debacle of the early part of the twenty-first century, which was both the failure with the weapons of mass destruction and the Jason Blair case, there’s now a public editor who exposes those issues to the world, when we would not even have known about them 50 years ago.
Goleman: But you know, Howard, the Times is very unusual in that regard, in having the conscience, if you will, to have a public editor. Most companies try to paper over things. How would a commons work? What are the ground rules of a commons?
Gardner: A commons will need to involve at least the people within the particular entity, whether it’s a newspaper, a corporation, or a school, and then there has to be agreement upon ground rules. One of the questions is: Can everybody in that organization participate? To what extent is it confidential? Can you submit things with anonymity? And that calls for what people now call curating. A curator, like the public editor, has to be quite clear about what he or she is doing, when they will allow anonymity, when something is on the record or when it’s off the record, and so on. And the record needs to be kept up to date in a sense that if there are lessons that people have learned, they have to be called on. I guess I haven’t thought about it before; it’s like common law in the commons. You don’t invent things from scratch.
Some years ago the dean of admissions at MIT was found to have lied about her own credentials for decades, and so she was summarily fired—and to me this was a no-brainer. You can’t be judging the credentials of thousands of people each year if you yourself aren’t honest about your own. Yet in a group of students at a very good liberal arts school in New England, we didn’t get a single student who thought that this person should be fired. They were divided between: “Well, she’s doing a good job; what’s the problem?” And “Well, everybody lies on their resume.” This was a wakeup call to me that we cannot assume that an ethical standard that may be obvious to somebody who comes out of a certain background is going to be obvious to a new generation. I think that’s probably a very important part of leadership, too. Without being a schoolmarm about it, one has to be able to provide reasons and examples for people who are growing up in a very different milieu.
For example, we’ve been looking at five issues that we might say people of a certain age will have views on: sense of identity, privacy, ownership/authorship, trustworthiness and credibility, and participation in community. The more you look at these things the more you see they’ve been totally transformed because of the Internet, social media, virtual reality, Twitter—you name it. You can’t think about intellectual property in the same way when it’s so easy to transpose and aggregate for yourself almost anything. What are trustworthiness and credibility when even if you send something privately it can be reproduced and sent to others? What is privacy, indeed? As we’re speaking, there’s a debate between the United States and Europe in which Europe asserts that web information should be automatically deleted after a certain period of time, because otherwise your privacy is at risk and in America people say, “Privacy? Get over it.” So, similarly, the leader cannot assume that ethical norms in one era can simply be transplanted en bloc to another era.
Goleman: That’s very troubling because companies can be torpedoed by unethical behavior. We read almost monthly of some political leader or business leader whose career has ended because of an ethical lapse.
Gardner: But how much more often, Dan, is it because they tried to hide it rather than confronting it? I read the newspaper pretty carefully, and I would say of 100 of these ethical boo-boos, in the course of a couple of years, you have at the most one resignation on the basis of principle. You know, the Japanese model: I did wrong, and I’m going to resign. And you have maybe a half a dozen out of 100 where people say, “It was wrong. We’re sorry we did it. These are the steps we’re going to take, and I’m going to start with myself—I’m going to cut my salary.” Then you’ve got 90-some examples of people first hiding it, and then it comes out and it gets worse and worse, and you wonder when people learn that the cover up is always more damning in the long run than the effort to come clean and to say, “We’re going to do better.” That’s part of the idea of a commons—knowing that everyone is bound to make mistakes. I know as a professor—I’ve been a professor forever, and I’ve done dozens of wrong things—is it better for me to hide and try to pretend they didn’t happen, or to be quite open about it? It doesn’t mean I have to call you up as a reporter and say this is what I did, but I ought to be talking to my colleagues and my students and trying to learn from these mistakes.
Goleman: But then aren’t you an exemplar, a leader, about how to handle ethical lapses? What I’m wondering is can you go a little more deeply into what leaders can do that will help socialize people into doing that?
Gardner: Absolutely. Leaders need to be very clear up front about what is acceptable and what is not. Number two, in wrong behavior they have to be punctilious about observing what is happening—and it helps if they do all types of humanizing aspects like eating in the same dining room, parking in the same lots, spending some time walking around and schmoozing. But then—here’s where the rubber hits the road—when there are violations, they have to be recognized and penalized. That doesn’t mean everybody gets fired the first time that they do it, but there have to be clear consequences. And one of the most awful things—which really, I think, decimates the non-profit world—is the secrecy around a chastisement or a fire. Where everybody gives a bullshit story of why the person was let go, and in truth it should be exactly the opposite. You know: “Dan Goleman was a great reporter, but the second time he recreated a quote out of thin air, he was let go. And let that be a lesson to you, because we cannot be a respected newspaper if people create quotations out of thin air or take them off the web.”
Goleman: So you’re saying that it’s better to go public with a lapse because that is a lesson for everyone else.
Gardner: Well, I think I’d have to do that on a case-by-case basis. I mean there are people’s careers and lives ahead of them, and I’m not sure if you’re working for Dunkin’ Donuts and you do something unethical that that ought to be something that I can call up the New York Times about. If you’re the CEO, damn straight—the New York Times should know it, because otherwise you just end up running Starbucks instead.
Goleman: Because as CEO you have a lot of fiduciary responsibilities, and that is a different order of magnitude?
Gardner: I think the rules ought to apply especially to the C-suite. When you’re reading the newspaper about boards of directors who are chums of those executives, and where they keep raising each others’ salaries—it’s nauseating. And yet, Dan, this has become so much the norm in the United States that people don’t even think about it anymore, even though it would be laughable in any other society, or in our own society 50 years ago.
The Role of Storytelling
Goleman: Howard, one of the points you make about leadership, which I find very important—and it’s really missing in my model of emotional intelligence and leadership—has to do with the power of storytelling. Or, as you say, leaders achieve their effectiveness through the stories they relate. You make a very important point: You can make an impact by embodying the story—you can be the story as well as telling a story. In my own work I talk about how great leaders move us, but I look at more the emotional exchange—not what the medium is of that exchange—and I think very often it’s what you’re saying. It is these stories—it’s who the leader is, how the leader is, what the leader tells us. You talk about three kinds of stories. One is the ordinary story. These are the stories that everybody tells—in this sector, in this domain, in this company, in this school. Then there are the innovative leaders who bring some new attention or a new twist to these same old stories. And then there’s the visionary leader who creates an entirely new story. It makes me think of the role of storytelling in innovation and in creativity.
Gardner: I would want to make a distinction between the role of stories in the actual creative process and then the role of stories, as it were, in spreading the creation to others. I’m absolutely certain that a very important part of any new invention, whether it’s mechanical or literary or artistic, is a narrative vehicle which helps people relate to it—particularly if, as you say, it’s quite innovative and helps them understand the ways in which it is complementary to, or consistent with, or directly in conflict with, what you did before. I mean I’m thinking of probably the most iconoclastic painting in the twentieth century: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. That was such a shock that he kept it under wraps for a decade because almost nobody could handle it. So I think the narrative around the introduction of something new is imperative. When it comes to the actual creative process itself, I think that would vary enormously. And I’ve never worked at an ad agency, but I would imagine at an ad agency narrative is very, very important. If you were working in a science lab and you picked up something askew—and you decide rather than ignoring it or throwing it away, you dig really deep into it. I think you could talk about a narrative in a kind of metaphoric way; namely, we used to phrase this one way, and now we frame it another. But I don’t think we need to have the story to tell yourself, though it’s an interesting idea to see how far you can push this story angle—not just in terms of public presentation and convincing, but actually in terms of creating the new ideas themselves. The reason many of us fell in love with Barack Obama is we read his book Dreams from My Father, and we said “What a fantastic human being to write this kind of thing.” And clearly that was a narrative in which he was telling himself about himself. Whether that translated into being an effective leader, we’re in the process of trying to see at this moment, and I think some people are disappointed.
Goleman: Well, I’m actually thinking about the new twist on a story in terms of innovation. And, for example, if you think about Mark Zuckerberg—there’s a guy who started to do something in a new way and who recruited people to that effort. Or you think about any startup—anyone who is going off in a new direction, be it in science, community service, business, or technology.
Gardner: Mark Zuckerberg probably got the idea working in his hotel room. Or in his dorm. We all will think it happened the way it happened in the movie, The Social Network, and he didn’t need anybody else for that. But once he began to become an enterprise, then clearly he needed to be able to attract people, and he needed to have leadership qualities also—the direct leadership qualities I write about in Leading Minds. Direct leadership means you know this is the person who is trying to convince you of something, and you look at what he says, how he says it, and how he behaves. Ultimately direct leadership can’t survive the hypocrisy test, because if you push something very strongly in your narrative, but every day you’re undoing it in your behavior, then you have Newt Gingrich—who is not very convincing anymore because what he calls for is so violated by his own life.
Indirect leadership is simply creating some kind of a symbolic product. It could be a literary work, it could be a mathematical equation, it could even be a computer program which itself is so heretical against the earlier standard that people consciously or unconsciously say: “God! We better pay attention to this.” And the reason your example is nice is because there are some kinds of inventions for which you don’t need to mobilize anybody else. I mean if you prove Fermat’s Last Theorem and you publish it, the work is done. But if you’re trying to start a corporation, you need the venture capitalists, and you need people who you can count on to give you honest feedback, and so on.
Goleman: It struck me as I was looking at Leading Minds that entrepreneurs need to be very effective storytellers, because basically it’s a promise of a possibility that they’re selling to people, and they need to mobilize people around them.
Gardner: If anything, I think it’s probably become too important. Namely, if you’re a great storyteller, you might have more success than is warranted, and if you’re a lousy storyteller you may never get to first base. What I would then ask—and I don’t know a venture capitalist personally—is to what extent are they smart enough to filter out the charisma and focus on the idea?
Goleman: Well, one of the ways in which innovative stories seem crucial in business is in changing direction, or in mobilizing people when things go wrong, or when interest is low and morale is low—when you need to reinvigorate, you need to stimulate, you need to direct. What are the kinds of levers that a leader can use to create an effective storytelling strategy to move people in the right direction?
Gardner: Well, I wrote a book called Changing Minds in which I actually use the term “lever,” and I talked about an arsenal of “levers,” so to speak—if I can mix the metaphor a bit. I think the first thing I would say is it depends who you are dealing with. If you are dealing with people who are highly sophisticated in what you’re doing—let’s say you’re running a hedge fund and you’re dealing with your partners who understand finance as well as you do—then the more academic levers of research and of reason are very, very important. If you’re running for political office, people are not going to look at your syllogisms and they’re not going to know enough to evaluate your data, so then things like resonance—whether you feel on the same wavelength with the leader, and he or she manages to convey that. I mean the appeal in the first years of the second decade of someone like Sarah Palin is clearly not because she’s particularly rational, or because she has a lot of data at her fingertips, but people feel she’s on their wavelength—she’s one of them, so to speak—and so that’s a very sharp contrast.
If you are dealing in an educational environment with people who are not terribly sophisticated, I then talk about re-description. Re-description is presenting the same ideas in many different ways, and this is where the work relates to multiple intelligences. Some people aren’t going to be convinced by a linguistic narrative. Then a cartoon, a comic, wit, dramatization, games—those are the other vehicles you can use to bring about a different way of doing things.
Another lever, which I make a lot of use of in my own teaching, is real world events. Real world events are circumstance over which you have no control—but the effective leader uses the real world events to change the conversation. As we’re talking, let’s say the stock market has just tanked. If I were teaching tomorrow, and when I’m talking to my kids tonight, that is something we talk about. Because people want to know: how does this event, whether it’s discovering gold or a plague, how does that affect us?
Another lever, which I think is underestimated, is dealing with resistances. When you tell a story, the story is never an immaculate conception. Everybody has many other stories in their mind, and those stories are often quite resistant to the story you want to tell. And almost everybody—and I’m unfortunately a textbook example of that—spends too much time trying to convince you of the story that they want to tell, and not enough time thinking of all the reasons why Dan Goleman might be embracing a very different kind of story. So the shrewdest mind-changers spend a lot of time trying to understand what the resistances are, and how to deal with them. I was able to watch Bill Clinton over the years in a live audience situation, and he was unrivaled in having a sixth sense about whether a comment he’d made had annoyed somebody in the audience. Then in the next sentence, he would smooth it out. Those of us who are academics and are dealing completely from arguments in our heads are very lousy at that, and the student has to throw something at us to get attention. But understanding the resistance—what I’m really saying is a leader cannot just have one strategy to fall back on when there’s a crisis. There’s a whole bunch of them, and he or she has to know his or her audience well enough, and also know which levers worked in the past and which ones ought to be pulled out for the occasion. There’s no reason just to use one lever, but if data hasn’t worked before, it’s pointless to bring out more data, because that’s not the coin of the realm at that particular time.
Leading and Truth
Goleman: I was somewhat amused to come across a case study you did for the Harvard Business Review, in about 2003 or 2004. It was on BP, the oil company, and leadership there. You were talking about a time when BP went from focusing on being just a petroleum company to focusing on other, alternative energies. And you used the example of the CEO there as someone who had used the leadership levers quite effectively for that change. We all know the irony of the story is, of course, the gulf oil spill. I’m not sure it was the same CEO that you were writing about.
Gardner: It wasn’t, but I think in retrospect—I knew John Browne, the head of BP, for many years, to some extent, and I think I was charmed by him personally, and by his story. He may well have believed it at the time, but due diligence since has suggested that it was more a surface kind of change than a change in actual practice.
Goleman: This is where I’m going, which is, how do we know whether to believe a leader’s story?
Gardner: It’s incredibly difficult. The way I’ve come to talk about it recently is how do we discover what’s true in an era of truthiness and Twitter? Most people know with Twitter, if you can’t say it in 140 characters, no one is going to pay any attention to it. And truthiness is a wonderful word invented by Stephen Colbert. Nowadays people don’t look at the method by which you’ve arrived at what you say and the evidence for it. If you say it often enough, if you call it a death panel, whether or not it’s a death panel in reality, it takes on a reality of its own. I think probably because I’m not somebody who was able to do a lot of due diligence with respect to BP, I was taken in by the story. I’m glad I didn’t do it about Enron, but if I had written about Enron 10 years ago I probably would have said, “What a great company.” In my own work now, one of my analyses of American society is that society is really dominated by fear and greed. Fear about what’s going to happen to me, and greed: “I better have it all.”
Jack Welch was held up as being the outstanding business leader of the latter part of the twentieth century. What were his levers? Basically, fear and greed. If you were not one of the best people in the company, you would get fired, and when the company wasn’t ranked one or two, it got dropped. Now, everybody said, “That’s a hero.” I think we now see the pathology involved in running something through fear and greed. So I guess my honest answer to you is: you can never know for sure. There’s no substitute for due diligence, and what I think more and more—and here’s where I wear my education hat—is we don’t have to waste time teaching people facts any more. They’re all on their smart phones. We need to teach people methods.
How does a journalist get at what he does? How does the writer of the annual report for a company get at what he does? How do we look at what a politician says in light of what he or she has done? Because if we don’t know the methods used prior to public statements, then we’re going to be continuously fooled. That’s, of course, very bad—even though many people would love us to be fooled.
I think that’s the tension for business people who are reading this: You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all the people some of the time—and if you sell the company before they realize they were fooled, you’re going to be a rich person.
Goleman: So the end of that is, hopefully, you can’t fool all the people all the time. Hopefully.
Gardner: Yes, and I think the other part of it is, when it’s all said and done, what do you want to be remembered as? And almost everybody asks that question near the end, but not enough people asked it all the way through. In my world, there’s what you call the Boston Globe test, which is how would your mother feel if she opened up the Boston Globe in the local newspaper and she read about everything you did and how you did it? That’s been very helpful to me throughout my life.
Developing the Ethical Mind
Goleman: Howard, in your book, Five Minds for the Future, you discuss the disciplined mind and several others—one of which is the ethical mind. How does an ethical mind develop, and what does it look like in a leader?
Gardner: One of the things about an ethical mind is that it’s not something that one can develop early in life. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be respectful, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be good people, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be moral. But to think ethically, you have to be able to think of yourself abstractly. So you’re Dan. You probably were Danny at some point, and we expected Danny to behave himself and to be respectful, and my guess is you did pretty good there. But we begin to talk about ethics when we talk about Dan as a reporter, as you were for many years. And we talk about Dan, let’s say, as a citizen of the United States, and as a citizen of the world. You have to be able to take yourself out of the kid who played baseball or played the piano or who went double-dating with the next-door neighbor, and think of yourself more abstractly, in terms of the role of the professional, and in terms of the role of the citizen. Even though, clearly, things before adolescence can be relevant, adolescence is the first time in life where you really can think of yourself in those roles.
Goleman: You’re saying that because of the way the mind develops cognitively and its neural development?
Gardner: Yes. And we find that there are three kinds of support for ethical thinking. We call them horizontal support, vertical support, and wake up calls. Vertical support, which has traditionally been the most important, is who are your teachers, who are your mentors, who are the people whom you respect. Did you go to work for a reporter who just said, “Go report,” or were there people who you looked up to and tried to emulate—hopefully not just in terms of bylines, but the way they went about their business? We learned, as a parenthesis, that many people are more influenced by the tormenters and the anti-mentors, because the one thing I want to be is not like so-and-so! But the vertical thing is obvious. It’s the oldest way.
Horizontal is very important too, particularly in a very peer-oriented society like ours. What are the other people doing—the other citizens, the other professionals? How are they behaving? Particularly if they don’t set a high standard, then that’s very difficult. If you’re a reporter and everybody else is cutting corners and cheating, you’re facing an ethical dilemma very quickly. Do you join them, or do you leave the paper, or do you try to change the way things are?
Wake-up calls can be good or bad. That’s when something happens in your work or your citizenship where you say, “Oh my God.” “OMG,” as we say nowadays. What happens when the person in the next cubicle is found to have actually plagiarized a lot of stories? Or what happens if somebody who you thought was a schnook gets a Pulitzer Prize, and you say, “My God, that person really knew what he or she was doing?” All of us have that in our professional lives.
If I were playing God for a young doctor, young lawyer, young accountant, young businessperson, I would look at the vertical thing—who are the heroes, who are the inspiring figures? Is it Al Dunlap at Sunbeam, who got great pleasure out of decimating companies, or is it a heroic figure like Aaron Feuerstein who saved Malden Mills, even though he could have just collected the insurance and closed it down? I would look at who’s a peer, who else is hired, and on what basis. Who gets promoted and who gets fired? That’s a tremendously powerful message. If a real schmuck gets promoted, that’s a very different lesson than if somebody you would think really is doing a fantastic job gets promoted.
And then look at what happens to the wake-up call. The wake-up call could be the company puts out something, which causes somebody to die. How is that handled? That is really important—and as I said earlier, in 95% of the cases, it’s denied or covered up, and that’s always the disaster.
Good Work Defined
Goleman: Howard, one of the projects of your research that I find really important and fascinating, particularly in terms of leadership, is what you call “good work.” Could you explain what you mean by good work and how it matters for leaders?
Gardner: Absolutely. I’ve been working for 15 years with a large research team headed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Bill Damon, and myself—three psychologists—and we were interested in what good work was and how it survived at a time when things change very quickly and markets are very powerful. Our discovery of what good work is was an empirical discovery; it’s not something we knew a priori. Good work involves the intertwining of three features: excellence, engagement, and ethics. Good work is technically excellent work—people know what they’re doing. It’s personally engaging and meaningful. They want to do it. They look forward to going to work. They don’t dread it. And it’s carried out in an ethical way. So, at the risk of being a bit clever, we talk about a triple helix—three Es: the strands of excellence, engagement, and ethics. Of course, you can be one or two of these things, but the good worker is at the same time excellent, engaged, and ethical.
We then go on to say what factors promote good work or make it more difficult, and there the process of alignment is very important. If you are in any kind of an entity—an organization, institution, whatever—where everybody wants the same thing and the signals are pretty clear, you’re in what we call an aligned situation. And it’s easier to do good work if everybody wants the same thing. It turned out the first two areas we looked at were diametrically opposite in terms of alignment, and that’s where we came up with the idea. Genetics, at the end of the twentieth century, was very well aligned. Everybody wanted to know more about the genome, because everybody wanted to be healthier. Live longer. There was a lot of money for science, and nobody was second-guessing the scientists. The other area we looked at was journalism, and journalism was massively misaligned. The people who went into it wanted to do good investigative reporting. The people who owned the companies wanted to make a lot of money. The public was basically interested in gossip and celebrity stuff. In our study, we interviewed 100 geneticists. Nobody wanted to leave the field. In journalism, and this is 15 years ago, a third of the people wanted to leave the field, and many of them did. And, of course, that’s a very nice social science indicator. If you’re not engaged, it’s going to be very difficult to do good work.
What we hadn’t realized when we began the good work project was that it applies equally to citizenship, because the good citizen is excellent. He or she knows what’s going on—the law, regulations, and so on. I mean, you could memorize the Constitution but never vote, or never participate in public debate. But good citizens try to do the right thing; they aren’t just into self-aggrandizement above everything else.
Goleman: But wouldn’t you say that also applies 100% to employees? Aren’t those traits you want to have in an organization?
Gardner: Absolutely. I think the tricky thing is: what is the role of the people who make the norms, and who are the public figures either supporting good work, or giving it lip service, or not even aiming for that sort of thing?
Goleman: Well, would you say this is an inherent tension within a business? Can business leaders exemplify good work?
Gardner: I think it is very difficult in business, because there is no agreed-upon ethical code in the area of business. The distinction I make is for the jobs for which you have to get a license—because you can, at least in principle, be disbarred, or kicked out of medicine, for example. The traditional ones are law, medicine, engineering, and architecture. Then there are areas that are clearly non-professions: the arts and business. That’s not a value judgment. Anybody can be an artist. Anybody can be a businessperson. You don’t need a degree, and you can’t get kicked out unless you do something illegal. Then there are areas like journalism, which are kind of quasi-professions. Anybody can join a newspaper, but because there’s been a practical development over the centuries of norms, you can in fact be kicked out of the newspaper, even if you don’t do something that is considered disobeying the law. And that’s what happens to somebody who basically plagiarizes or makes up a story.
The interesting thing, Dan, with reference to your question, is: nobody can make somebody a good worker, and nobody can keep you from being a good worker. So you can be in the crappiest company in the world, but you can decide, like the bus driver at the beginning of Emotional Intelligence, that you’re going to behave in an excellent, engaged, and responsible way. Nobody can keep you from it.
On the other hand, you can be working in nirvana and you can still decide to be a freeloader or to get away with murder or so on. So ultimately, it’s an individual psychological and motivational decision. Full stop. I don’t want to live in a society where the decision about who’s a good worker has to be on the shoulders of the worker. I want to live in a society where there’s a lot of support for good work, and a lot of criticism for compromised and bad work, and that’s why I spend more time in Scandinavia than any other part of the world, because I think they have a better sense of good work and good citizenship, and you don’t have to remind people all the time because it’s in the water, it’s in the DNA.
Goleman: What would a business leader look like who exemplified good work?
Gardner: A business leader who exemplified good work would be somebody who understood himself or herself, understood the corporation or company that they were in very well, knew something about their history, understood the domain—the sector in which they’re working, which could be anything from transportation to widgets—and had some sense of the mega-trends going on in the world. You cannot be an excellent leader unless you’ve thought about this kind of knowledge, so that’s excellence.
Engaged means they really love their work. They want to do it. Their energy crystallizes other people, and the other people in their team love them and want to be with them. Charisma doesn’t hurt, but you ought to be able to inspire people even if you’re not charismatic, because of the way you behave.
The third aspect that we focus on is the person is always trying to do the right thing. And the right thing, of course, involves the self, it involves the company, but if it only is about advancing the company, then it cannot be ethical. There are many things we could do to advance the company which are bad for the company in the long run, or bad for society.
Goleman: Well, I think I need to push back a little. Did I hear you say that you can’t be a good leader if all you care about is promoting the company?
Gardner: Of course you need to promote the company, otherwise you shouldn’t be the leader. But if you’re promoting the company at all costs, you’re not thinking about how the workers are being affected, what happens to the company in the long run, what are the externalities. If you’re not thinking about the people that might be hurt by what you do, then you certainly would not be an ethical leader, and it’s a continuing conversation. You never get to be ethical or not, there’s always an effort to try to figure out what is the right thing in the broader picture, and whom we respect over the long run.
Leading and Self-Awareness
Goleman: Howard, I have become very interested in self-awareness as a leader’s capacity to take stock, to reflect, to look at things in a bigger perspective, and I wonder: does that play into your thinking on leadership in any way?
Gardner: When I’ve written about leadership, one of the things I’ve said is interpersonal intelligence—understanding yourself, knowing yourself—is a significant aspect of leadership. But as somebody who’s a psychologist and who knows that you can never know yourself with any totality, I don’t think it’s a good feature of a good leader to be obsessive about self, about motivation, and so on. I guess I would even go so far as to say that self-knowledge really needs to be with reference to your role as a leader in the company. And that can be pretty expansive, because if you have a temper, if you make people feel bad, those are things you need to know.
On the other hand, to think of yourself as a parent versus thinking of yourself as a voter, I’d say that’s extra credit. I don’t think a leader needs to be introspective in that way. It would be very interesting to take a look at the American presidents who are well known in terms of what kind of self-knowledge they had—what kind they lacked, and what was important, and what was unimportant. It’s very interesting to think, for example, of leaders in terms of what kind of a family person they were and whether they had any sensitivity there. I think there’s very little correlation between that and how effective you are in a public position as a leader.
Goleman: So, Howard, what you’re saying, if I understand you, is that some self-reflection or self-knowledge matters, but it should be the right kind. You should have the right focus, which has to do with “How am I doing in this role? What do I need for this role?” And one of the paradoxes is that leaders, the higher they go, the less vertical feedback they get on how they’re actually doing, because people are afraid to tell them. So leaders can go off in a direction thinking they’re doing fine, not realizing they’re not, which suggests to me a heightened need for a certain kind of self-awareness.
Gardner: I agree, and I would think that the shrewd leader there goes out of his or her way to get that kind of feedback.
Goleman: Which might be from someone whose opinion you trust, who you can speak candidly to?
Gardner: Right, and where it can be reciprocated, if that’s the best way. I know that there are certain colleagues of mine who tell me when I’m writing crap, because I’ll tell them when they’re writing crap. But I face the same thing with my own writing. People publicly are happy to lambaste me; but privately, if I show it to many people, they’ll just say, “It’s very good,” and that’s not what I need. So the self-knowledge is to be sure to show it to people who will give me honest feedback.
Goleman: Because what you’re looking for is a certain kind of performance feedback, and you need the truth for that?
Gardner: Yes, and psychoanalysis might be more important than what we’re talking about if you want to be successful out of work, but it’s a different kind of self- knowledge.
The Seven Levers of Leadership
Goleman: In Changing Minds you talk about seven levers that a leader can use. A reason statement, research that backs that statement, allotting resources, dealing with resistance, creating resonance, connecting to people, and two more. Could you give some examples, or show us how that was used by one leader?
Gardner: Abraham Lincoln was a trained lawyer. I mean he read law and he certainly could argue. He could use reason. He wasn’t a statistician or anything, but he had plenty of examples of what he was talking about. He knew precedent—that’s what I would call research as opposed to reason—and he was a good debater, and those are both rational and data-driven kinds of roles.
He had a unique capacity to connect to people and have them connect to him, through humor, through humility—so he was very, very resonant. That also speaks to the fact that he didn’t just talk a good game, he could describe things in many, many different ways and he could embody in his own behavior the sorts of things that he wanted to bring about in others. The whole notion of a team of rivals—of bringing other people with other perspectives—was a very powerful message. And he wasn’t so tunnel visioned that he knew that he was right.
As far as real world events, he didn’t cause the South to secede. He didn’t cause victories and defeats, but he had to make the most of it, whether it was at Gettysburg or in changing General McClellan, things like that.
And the two levers—rewards and punishments—certainly his selection of people knew that if they didn’t do a good job, they knew they would not be there forever. And that’s a kind of punishment, and I don’t know that much about rewards, but certainly he was able to overlook disagreements with people if he felt they were helpful to him in his work.
And then finally, understanding the resistances. I think that’s where he really was masterful, because if you look at his speeches—and of course, he wrote many speeches going back to 20 years before his presidency—he was always very aware of what other people would think when they didn’t agree with him, and how to resolve this, how to take them into account, and how to bring them aboard.
PART THREE: CREATE TO
INNOVATE, TERESA AMABILE AND DANIEL GOLEMAN
Creativity and Innovation
Daniel Goleman: I’m delighted to be here with Teresa Amabile, an old friend, and someone whose work I’ve been following since the early part of my career—and really perhaps the leading researcher on creativity in the workplace, and perhaps creativity generally. So thank you for joining me, Teresa.
Teresa Amabile: It’s my pleasure, Dan.
Goleman: So, Teresa, let’s start with the basics. What do you mean by creativity? How does it matter for work these days, and what’s the difference between creativity and innovation?
Amabile: Well, Dan, creativity is essentially responsible for all of human progress. And because it’s such a phenomenal force, people tend to think that it’s very mysterious. In fact it’s not all that mysterious. There’s been some wonderful research over the past 50 or 60 years illuminating a lot about creativity and how it happens. Creativity is the production of anything. It could be an idea, a tangible product, a performance, anything that’s both novel and appropriate. So it has to be novel; it has to be different from what’s been done before in some way. It also has to be appropriate to some goal or some meaning. It can’t just be different for the sake of being different. It can’t be bizarre. It’s useful in some sense. Now, it’s difficult in some domains to talk about usefulness.
For example, in art, what does appropriateness mean in graphic art? There, appropriateness means it expresses some meaning that the artist intended. But in business, creativity has to be different from what’s been done before, and it has to be appropriate to some goal. It has to work in some way. It has to make some contribution to some valuable end.
Goleman: So the way you’re defining creativity as an ingenuitive innovation takes it out of the silo of the ”creative” professions—the advertising folks or R&D—and extends it to everybody.
Amabile: Yes, in fact it’s a myth that creativity is something that happens only in the arts, although that may be what we naturally think of first when we hear the word ”creativity.” But it’s not something that only happens in the arts and the sciences. Creativity can happen in any realm of human endeavor at all, as long as people are doing something new that works, that’s feasible. Now, the connection between creativity and business success is very important, and it’s often really overlooked. Business people tend to think of what they do as being very planful—very organized, very strategic—and of course it should be, but businesses cannot succeed, especially under modern competitive conditions, without innovation. And innovation depends on creativity. Creativity is the front end of a process that ideally will result in innovation. So creativity is coming up with new and useful ideas.
Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas. And one interesting connection between creativity and innovation is that you can actually have quite a lot of creativity in a business organization without having much innovation at the other end—if people aren’t very good, or systems aren’t very good, in that organization, at hearing the creative ideas, developing them, letting them grow, and figuring out how to implement them successfully. So you can have creativity without having innovation. You can’t have innovation, though, unless you’ve got a lot of creativity going on at the front end.
Goleman: But it seems to me that competitive edge depends on continual innovation. It’s “innovate or die,” isn’t it, in today’s business world?
Amabile: Absolutely. Businesses have to innovate in modern times if they want to survive, due to technological advances. If businesses don’t understand them and don’t take advantage of them, they’re going to be left behind. Additionally, every business now has many more competitors than any comparable business did even 10 or 20 years ago because, as we know, competition is happening on a global scale.
Goleman: Well, if it’s “innovate or die” today, then we need to know—what are the active ingredients in creativity? What makes it work?
Amabile: In order for any person to be creative, first of all that person has to have a set of skills. So you’re not going to be able to do anything creative in nuclear physics unless you know a lot about nuclear physics. So you have to have expertise in the domain where you’re working, whether it’s art, mathematics, marketing—anything. And that expertise depends on talent, which is something that is partly innate, partly what we come with, but it also depends a lot on experience—formal and informal training on the job. It depends on technical skill and the ability to learn new things in an area. There’s another kind of skill that’s very important, Dan, and that is skill in creative thinking—so the ability to take new perspectives on problems, the ability to look at things in a way that other people aren’t looking at them, to go out on a limb, to take risks in some way.
This is actually related to both cognitive style and personality. Some people are naturally better able to do this, but it’s also something that you can learn. It’s a skill, creative thinking, that you can actually build—your ability to become more flexible and more fluent and more original in your thinking. Also, you have to be skilled at working hard. I know it sounds pretty mundane, but it’s a really important ingredient of creativity. You have to be able to persevere under extreme difficulty. So that’s a skill set that you need in order to be creative in any area. You also need a certain set of psychological states. Now, my original work looked at the connection between intrinsic motivation and creativity. That research discovered that people are most creative when they’re motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself, and not motivated primarily by external goals—external motivators or external pressures.
Goleman: People aren’t creative for money?
Amabile: People can be creative for money, if money is a secondary goal—if it’s a secondary motivator for them. The primary motivation for people to do their most creative work is intrinsic. It’s passion! It’s being excited about the work that you’re doing. It’s under those conditions, when that’s the primary thing driving you, that you’re going to be most creative in your work.
Now, I focused initially on the importance of motivational state for creativity, and I found that under certain conditions, under certain work conditions, even someone who was naturally very interested in doing something could have that interest—that intrinsic motivation—undermined by unfavorable conditions in their work environment, whether it was a classroom or a business meeting. I’ve recently come to discover that there are two other important kinds of psychological states that are necessary for creativity in addition to motivation. I call this package of psychological states “inner work life.” Inner work life is the motivation, the intrinsic motivation that I just talked about, but it’s also emotion. What I’ve discovered in my most recent research is that people are most likely to be creative when they’re in a positive mood, when they have a positive, pleasant, energetic, effective response to the work that they’re doing, and to the environment in which they’re doing it. I had not noticed the importance of emotion in creativity prior to this. Emotion is related to motivation. The two of them interact, but they’re not the same thing.
The third psychological state that’s really important is a set of positive perceptions of the work that you’re doing—its value, its meaningfulness. Perceptions of the place where you’re working: Is it a place that does important things? That does good things? That treats its people well? And perceptions of your coworkers: Are they smart? Are they engaging? Are they cooperative with what you’re trying to do? Perceptions of yourself in the place where you’re working: Am I valued here? Am I making a real contribution here? So these motivations, emotions, and perceptions, which can change on the basis of momentary events, happen in the work environment. This package of psychological states, inner work life, is very important for creativity.
Managing for Creativity
Goleman: So, Teresa, let’s say I’m a manager and I’m in charge of a group of software writers, engineers, or marketing people, and I know that our competitive edge really depends on innovating well. What do I need to know about what encourages creativity and what squelches it, and what should I do and stop doing?
Amabile: If you’re a manager who wants to support creativity, the first thing you have to understand is the importance of inner work life for creativity. And there are some companies that get this, but I think that most really don’t understand it. You probably know about Zappos, the online shoe retailer. You may not know about their happiness philosophy. So the CEO, Tony Shea, and the COO, Alfred Linn, talk about their philosophy that you can’t have happy customers unless you have happy employees. And they really credit this philosophy with the incredible success of Zappos in taking over an enormous market share of online shoe retailing, and now retailing of other retail clothing items as well. What they do at Zappos is to support the happiness—the well-being, day by day—of their employees by making sure that they have the support that they need to do work that matters to them as employees, and by making sure that the working conditions are as conducive as possible to that. So whether these people are in the call center taking orders—which in many instances can be an incredibly dull, mind-deadening job—people really enjoy their work at Zappos. They are given leeway to really engage in that work. Engage with the customers in a way that most people in call centers aren’t able to do. So that awareness of the importance of emotion, positive emotion, to creativity in the workplace makes a big difference.
Managers can do and say things every day that will matter enormously for people’s ability to be creative. We did a study recently, my colleagues and I, looking in great detail at what supports and what undermines creativity day by day. Let me tell you a little bit about how we did this research. We decided in order to delve into the minds and hearts of people who were trying to do creative work every day, we needed access to what was really happening in their everyday work lives. So we approached a number of companies, a number of teams, a number of individuals, and asked them if we could collect daily electronic diaries from people who were trying to do creative work—people who were working on projects where creativity was not only possible, but it was necessary in order for the work to be done successfully. Most of these people were doing new product development of some kind, but many of them were grappling with difficult business problems of other types—trying to solve an important client problem, for example. So in this study, we ended up looking at 238 professionals working in 26 different project teams in seven different companies in three different industries, and we asked them if we could follow them with these daily diaries every day through the entire course of a project that they were doing. We ended up with nearly 12,000 daily diary entries, which we’ve spent years analyzing to look at what really makes the difference for people in terms of a ”best day,” where they’re able to really do creative and productive work, and they feel great about what they’re doing, and a ”worst day,” where they’re really unable to engage deeply in the work—they feel very badly about what they’re doing, and they’re not able to be productive.
What we found is that of all the events that make for a really good day at work, the single most important is simply making progress in meaningful work. Even if that progress seems like just an incremental step forward—a small win. Those small wins can give people an enormous boost emotionally, and can really raise their level of intrinsic motivation for what they’re doing and lead to creativity. So in one of our studies, as we analyzed these data, we found that if people are experiencing progress in their work, they’re much more likely to feel emotionally positive about themselves and about what they’re doing. Under those conditions, they’re more likely to come up with a creative idea. We didn’t ask them, “Tell us about something creative that you did today.” We simply asked them in this diary to report one event that stood out from the day. If they happened to mention that they solved a problem in a way that was not routine, or they came up with a new idea, we counted that as evidence that they’d been creative that day. We found that on those days that people were having more positive emotional experiences, they were more likely to come up with a creative idea. Not only that, but they were more likely to come up with a creative idea the next day.
Goleman: So small wins prime creative insights or breakthroughs, not just one day, but for the next day, too.
Amabile: Absolutely. Small wins or big wins, making progress in work leads people to feel happier about what they’re doing and more intrinsically motivated.
That primes creativity, creative problem solving, and idea generation—that day as well as the next day, even controlling for that next day’s mood. So there’s some kind of a carryover effect here—that when people are in this positive state of good inner work life, they’re more likely to make new connections between ideas, and that can carry over even into the next day.
Goleman: So one of the things that really makes creativity flourish are the small wins—the little events in the day that make us feel we’ve made a little bit of progress, that give us a little lift, and that somehow helps the creative mind be more fertile. What’s going on here?
Amabile: We think that the effect of small wins is so powerful because people need to feel effective in their work. They need to have that sense of self-efficacy—that they’re competent, that they’re getting somewhere, and that they’re doing something meaningful. Let me talk about meaningfulness for just a minute. You know about how famous Google has become, not only for its enormous business success, but also for the great work lives that employees enjoy at Google. A lot of people think that the great work life comes from the perks: the great food that’s free in the cafeterias, you can come in casual clothes, you can bring your dog with you—whatever. But we believe, in talking to some people in that company, in studying Google, that the real importance there is that people are doing work that they believe is meaningful, and that they’re supported in making progress in that work.
Goleman: Is this the famous one day of free time a week, or their work generally?
Amabile: There are a number of factors that really make a difference here. First of all, think about the mission of Google: to organize the world’s information, make it universally accessible and useful. Now that’s a motivational goal, right? That’s real meaning in the work that you’re doing. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page went public with Google, they said that they believed their main benefit was the workplace, a workplace where people work on important projects and feel that they can contribute and grow. So that’s a place where people are given access to the resources that they need, the help that they need, and the time that they need in order to really make progress on something that’s meaningful. We call this the “progress principle”—the importance of feeling that you’re getting somewhere in work that matters.
I can give you an example of the progress principle from our diary study. This was a relatively small team of software engineers, programmers, and people who were doing financial analysis for a very large hotel chain. We’ll call them the InfoMap Team. They were responsible for a great deal of the data gathering, data analysis, and information retrieval needs of this enormous company, so they had a lot of balls that they had to juggle at once. They had a particular project that landed on them that was really urgent—there were almost 150 million dollars of the company’s money riding on this project that had to be finished in eight days. This was very time urgent; it was really important. They knew how important it was. During this period of time, this team was protected from outside distractions by their top managers, so everything else was cleared off their plates and they could focus on this very important problem.
Goleman: Let me just ask you, how important is focused, uninterrupted time in creativity?
Amabile: It’s really difficult for most individuals to be creative unless they have some time for reflection. And that’s actually thinking alone, being able to take in the volume of information that they need to deal with in solving a problem, and being able to breathe and to think—even if it’s just for a few moments. It’s very hard to be creative on demand, in the context, say, of a business meeting. There is a lot that can happen there, there are a lot of interesting connections that can happen and information that can be exchanged, but it’s sometimes hard to really focus in on a problem. And it’s particularly important where people are doing an urgently important creative problem. They have to be protected from other agendas. They have to be protected from the necessity to fight fires in the day-by-day crises that come up in other arenas of work. They have to feel that they’re on a mission in order to be creative—that’s absolutely crucial.
In this project that the InfoMap Team was doing, they were really protected from those outside distractions. They had the help that they needed from others in the organization, so that help is another important facilitating condition for people to make progress on something meaningful. They were given a lot of attention by upper management in the form of encouragement for what they were doing. Managers would stop by and ask them, “What do you need? What can we get for you?” They would even bring them food and water if they were working late into the night. This really had an impact on people. This made them understand that what they were doing was truly important, and it gave more meaning to what they were doing, because they felt valued by that organization. Even though they had enormous technical obstacles to overcome—this was really a hard problem—they were able to see themselves making forward progress every day in the face of those setbacks. During those eight days the people on this team were more motivated, happier than they had been in a long time, even though they were working extremely hard. That’s the progress principle in action.
How to Optimize the
Creative Environment
Goleman: Well, what can a manager do to optimize creativity in the people on a team, in a division? And what do they do commonly that squelches it?
Amabile: There are a number of things that managers can do to support creativity in organizations—in teams and in individuals. Unfortunately, many managers don’t understand that they need to pay attention to these things. One of the most important is setting clear goals for a project. Letting people know where it is they’re going—what mountain they’re supposed to be climbing, and why it’s important, why it matters in the grand scheme of things.
At the same time that they give people clear goals, managers need to give people some autonomy in what they’re doing. So you know about the famous 15% rule at 3M. Google, I think, has a 20% time rule, and this is essentially protecting time for people to do whatever they want to do, whatever projects are really interesting to them, whatever problems captivate their curiosity. This is autonomy. This is feeling that you have a real sense of control over your own work—over your own ideas. Some of the most creative ideas come out of that time where people feel that they have autonomy, so as long as they have a clear sense of where they’re going, what they’re trying to accomplish overall in this company. And in this business, people can do great things, especially if they’re talented. If they have those skills, they can do great things under conditions where they have real autonomy.
People need resources to do creative work—not necessarily lavish, over-the-top resources, but sufficient resources to get the work done. You know, a lot of managers mistakenly think that people become more creative if they starve resources a little bit. Well, what I found is that people will be more creative in finding resources but not necessarily in actually solving the problems that they’re supposed to solve. So it is important to make sure that people have the necessary information to do their work—the necessary funding, the necessary materials. Those resources can’t be overlooked.
People have to have sufficient time to do creative work. Time is one of the most interesting factors that we’ve studied. We’ve learned that many managers believe that they can stimulate creativity by putting people under very tight deadlines. That’s a myth. In fact, across the board in general, people are more creative when they have a little bit of time to explore a problem—to really think, to reflect on what they’re doing, to go down different alleyways, explore alternatives, to gather new information—and to talk to people who might have different perspectives, which can be enormously useful.
Goleman: But aren’t people very often put in a meeting room and told, “Okay! Let’s come up with a solution!”
Amabile: Yes, people are often pressured to be creative right now, today, in this next hour. Now, you can stimulate some new thinking under those conditions if you break people out of the mental routines that they have been in, but we found that there’s only one very particular set of time-pressured conditions that lead to high-level creativity, and we call that “being on a mission.” People have to feel that what they’re doing is truly important and it is urgent. It’s not that somebody has placed an arbitrary deadline on us, it’s that we’re doing something that really matters where there’s an urgent need to get this done quickly—an urgent need that the company has before it can move forward on something important, or because a competitor is about to come out with something that would scoop us, or because a customer needs this desperately. It could also be because society has a desperate need for a solution to this problem.
A great example of really meaningful work under time pressure is the Apollo 13 story. This was a space mission to put people on the moon. While the space capsule was on its way, the various systems malfunctioned and the astronauts were in danger of asphyxiation. Down in Mission Control in Houston, people were desperate to find a solution. The engineers who were focused on that problem were completely freed up from doing anything else during that time. Talk about a deadline! This was a real deadline: People would be dead if they didn’t solve this problem quickly. Those engineers focused on this problem, they got whatever they needed in terms of help from others. They were able to actually solve that problem because they focused on it, they knew it was urgent; they understood how very important it was. Businesses can do something like that by putting people in the situation where they understand the urgency and they’re protected from distractions—where people are on a mission. But even on a mission, people cannot operate under very high time pressure and continue to be creative and provide for very long periods of time. They have to get a break, or they’re going to burn out.
Goleman: So you’re saying in extraordinary times, you can call on people to give their most under time pressure and they’ll likely produce because it does matter to them, but day-to-day, with the stream of innovations that every company needs to have happen, it’s a different set of circumstances that really facilitates creativity, isn’t that right?
Amabile: Unfortunately, the most common kind of time pressure in most business organizations is what we call being on a treadmill. You feel that you’re being constantly distracted from your real work—the real problems that you’re trying to solve—by crises that are erupting, by people interrupting you while you’re trying to do your work, by things that distract you from the most important work that you’re trying to do. We found that under these treadmill conditions, people are not able to focus on truly being creative in their work, though they do feel productive very often. They may end a day feeling that they got a lot done—“I worked for 14 hours, and I solved 14 different problems during this time.” But they don’t have that sense of satisfaction that they were working on the most important piece of their work, and they can go many days under those treadmill conditions without doing anything creative. So that’s one of the most important facilitators that managers can give to people, is the time and the focus to do creative work.
Motivating Creativity
Goleman: Teresa, with your new insights and understanding about what truly facilitates creativity—not what we believe does—what is it that you think managers really need to understand, that they might not, about how to help people be at their best?
Amabile: We were wondering how much of what we discovered about supporting creative, productive work, how much of that is really within the awareness of managers. So we did a very simple survey, my colleagues and I, a couple of years ago, where we asked nearly 700 managers around the world to rank specific motivators—specific levers that they might be able to use as managers to motivate people. These included a number of items that are part of the manager’s canon: recognition for good work, reward, tangible incentives, clear goals in the work, and interpersonal support. What we discovered as the number one most important motivator was progress in the work. So then we asked the 700 managers to rank them. We found that progress came in dead last in the ranking. Last. And in fact, only five percent of managers seemed to realize that progress is more important than anything else in motivating people to do creative, productive work. This was astonishing to us, because even if they had made their choices randomly, twenty percent of them would have gotten it right. They actively don’t understand how important progress is. It’s not that recognition and reward don’t matter. Yes, they do matter, and people feel good when they’re rewarded for doing something at work—when they’re recognized, when they have clear goals, when they get interpersonal support—but progress is very important, and it’s really underrated by most managers. So I think that’s the key thing that managers really need to understand about supporting creative progress at work.
Goleman: But by progress, you don’t mean achieving substantial goals. You mean the small little victories that people have—of solving a problem in computer code, something like that?
Amabile: Absolutely. Absolutely. The small wins can make an enormous difference, and it’s really important for managers to try to facilitate those small wins in the work day by day. Because big breakthroughs, although they’re wonderful, are extremely rare. In fact, all the 26 teams that we studied, only one had a bona fide breakthrough in its project during the time that we were studying them.
The small wins are great, and they can lead to enormously productive and creative work. Let me give you an example of a small win. One of the programmers we were studying in one of the high-tech companies that we researched sent in a diary entry one day that said something like this: “I finally smashed that bug that’s been frustrating me the past few days. This may not seem like an event to you, but I’m all hyped. I live a very drab life.” And then he said something like, “The other people on the team who would appreciate this aren’t in right now, so I have to sit here rejoicing in my solitary smugness.”
Goleman: I love that example, because it brings creativity and innovation down from a pedestal—which is a rare event—to something that relates to our experience every day at work. What you’re saying is this creates a good feeling that in turn makes us more able to innovate—a kind of virtuous spiral, if you will. What are the things that get in the way and what do managers need to keep in mind? If you were to tell managers, “Here are three things that will help your people be better at innovation and creativity,” what might those be?
Amabile: I would love to tell managers that they need to be sure that the people who are doing work that is supposed to be creative and innovative have the time, the space, and the resources to actually get the work done.
It seems so mundane, Dan, but it’s absolutely important. People do need materials to do creative work. They need instruments, they need information, but time and space are crucial. People also need to understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why it matters, why it’s important. So having an overall vision that’s motivating—and making sure people understand that—is absolutely crucial. Making sure that people have the help that they need in getting the work done, that they understand that they can fail. They can take risks and fail if the effort was good, because there’s value in learning from failure and learning from mistakes. We all, as individuals, need to understand that. So there are a set of supports that managers can put in place to support the work itself.
The other thing I’d love to tell managers is: You need to support the people themselves doing the work. So we call these things that support the work itself “catalysts.” We call the things that support the people doing the work “nourishers.” You need to nourish their emotional lives at work. This doesn’t mean spending all of your time trying to figure out someone’s psyche, or being intrusive into what they’re thinking and feeling at every moment, but it does mean giving people respect and recognition for their value as individuals. It means respecting their ideas.
Goleman: It sounds to me that managers, if they’re really going to help people be as creative and innovative as possible, need to start paying attention to what you call the inner work life.
Amabile: Yes, managers not only need to support the work. They need to support the people doing the work as well. Inner work life is the combination of emotions, perceptions, and motivations that people have as they go through their work days, as they experience and react to the events happening in their work days. Managers are often the source of those events that can have such an important impact on people’s inner work lives. Even a small thing that a manager says or does can have an enormous impact on someone. I’m really surprised in our diary research to learn the enormous impact that seemingly small events can have. Not just small wins, but small losses as well—setbacks in the work, but also small helps with the work. Or hindrances with the work on the negative side can make a big difference for how people feel, what their inner work life is going to be like that day. Commitment to the work and collegiality are crucial as well. Managers need to nourish that inner work life by showing people basic respect and recognition for their work, showing that they are valued and that their ideas are valued. It’s important to encourage people when they’re really struggling with difficult problems in their work. Or, if it’s clear that they’re struggling with something in their personal life, giving them some emotional support. And managers need to set up conditions where people can feel a sense of affiliation—a sense of camaraderie with each other.
We found that even during those times that the work itself might be somewhat tedious, or even really difficult, they can be nourished by feeling that they’re working with people they care about and people who care about them.
Developing Your Own Creativity
Goleman: You know, Teresa, in today’s working world, more and more people whose livelihood depends on being creative and innovative continually are working for themselves. They’re freelancers, they’re consultants, they’re independent. If you were to set up an ideal work life for yourself, if you were to manage your own creativity, what would be the things you should keep in mind? What are the active ingredients?
Amabile: For us as individuals, we first of all need to pay attention to our skill development. We have to keep our skills sharp, because that is an important piece of creativity. So learning new things inside and outside our areas of expertise can be enormously important in helping to spark those new associations that will lead to creativity. We need to engage in constant conversation—contact with people who have different perspectives, who come from different fields. That’s really going to fertilize our thinking. We can sharpen our creative thinking skills by trying to take new perspectives on problems, by forcing ourselves to break out of our mental sets. So those are the skills that we need to keep sharp for ourselves as individuals.
The other piece of what we need to do for ourselves to keep ourselves creative is to pay attention to our motivation—make sure that we’re excited about what we’re doing. If we find that we’re getting a little dull, a little deadened in the work that we’re doing, we need to look for new projects, new people to work with, new things to do.
The other piece of it is every day we have to focus on what progress we’ve made. Now it’s awfully easy to get discouraged given how busy most of us are in our day-to-day work lives. It’s difficult to keep sight of the progress that we actually are making. I advise people to keep a daily diary, and I’m trying to do this myself now. Even if you just spend two or three minutes at the end of the day, jot down what things you actually got done that day that moved things forward for you in projects that you care about. Maybe it’s something that you didn’t plan on getting done that day. If you can see yourself learning, getting somewhere, doing something that matters to you and to people that you care about, keep track of it. Look back on your record of the progress that you’ve made and the enjoyment that you found in your work. Also keep track of what might be standing in the way, what obstacles you encountered that day and try to find ways of overcoming those obstacles. Make a plan for the next day to build on the progress that you had the prior day to refocus on your goals, and to overcome whatever might be standing in your way from making even more creative progress the next day.
Goleman: Teresa, what do you do when you want to have a creative day, and how do you organize that day?
Amabile: For me, it’s really important to protect time to think, to be creative, to really get into the flow experience of doing work that I love doing—where I feel that I can expand my mind and really try out something new. So if I’m writing something new, putting together new ideas, or designing a new research project, I try to protect time early in the day for that—when I’m mentally fresh, and when I’m not feeling the weight of crises that might arise during the day.
I actually get up before dawn most days, or at dawn. I usually get up around five o’clock, and I love that quiet time of the day. I know the phone is not going to ring. I know that I’m not going to have emails streaming in, people needing me at that moment, and I find that I like protecting a couple of hours earlier in the day—ideally the entire morning, but even just a couple of hours—to really focus on new ideas, on putting something together. It doesn’t always feel good, it often doesn’t feel easy, but it’s very satisfying to be able to deeply engage with creative work in that early part of the day when I’m fresh. I’ve interviewed a number of creative writers and I find that they follow that same routine: They’ll protect a few hours for themselves early in the day, and then deal with life the rest of the day.
