Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

I’ve just arrived home from an excellent day on the Cultural Leadership Programme’s (CLP) “Leadership Development Days” programme, and while it’s fresh I’m going to write up an overview of what it was all about and what I got out of it.

CLP is all about raising skills in the creative and cultural sector - something I think needs to be up the priority list (especially given the West Midlands productivity and skills gaps).

In line with what I’ve been saying about ‘where are the leaders’, and in fact what Gordon Brown’s been talking about recently, I thought that it was high time that I booked myself onto a relevant course to see if I could pick up some tips on making myself more effective in making interesting things happen in the world.

Morning in London

As with many ‘creative and cultural’ things, the focus point is London, so I went down on the train the night before and got a hotel to be fresh for the day. The venue was on the South Bank - in fact Ernst & Young’s (slightly too-) impressive offices at More London Place.

CLP run events all round the UK - I just wanted to get on the first one, so I was happy travelling - although it worked out pretty expensive all in. £130 for the hotel + £40 for the train + food etc, but given that the training was free, that seemed fair to me.

Arriving there in the opulent corporate surroundings I’d already struck up a conversation with one of the other participants and within about ten minutes I’d got talking to nearly everyone attending. Very friendly indeed.

Slash/slash careers

In the usual ’say a bit about yourself’ round-robin intro it was obvious that a lot of my co-attendees were quite similar to me. Many had a “slash / slash” way of describing themselves. “I’m an artist slash educator slash chairman of x” and so on - and people with quite a variety of backgrounds too.

Priorities: BME / disabled / micro-businesses

The other thing to note was there was a good mix of people from a wide range of cultural (which in this definition includes creative enterprise) organisations, and there was a strong presence of people with disabilities and people from a BME (is this jargon?) background. That’s because CLP sees these groups and creative micro-businesses (strangely this is defined by number of employees - Last.FM anyone?) as priorities.

I really learnt a thing or two talking to a blind musician and a deaf artist who both helped me understand how disabilities can have an impact on how people perceive them and how they have to often be more effective leaders to make impact. In fact this kind of frank discussion with people that you may not normally come into contact with was one of the best things about the day. As always - the bits in-between can often be as good as if not better than what’s programmed.

So what was the programme?

I’m not going to give a full run-down of the programme of the day here - that would be a bit harsh to the organisers: People Create.

What I will do is give a rough overview and pick out a few things that were good for me.

Hopes and fears

We worked out the kinds of things that we were hoping to get out of the day, and what we were potentially worried about. This sprawled into some general discussions about hopes and fears of just ‘being’ a leader. Mine: I’m looking for a way to make some judgements about a range of opportunities that I currently have in front of me and to work out which way to go with them. Simply put - this coming week is all about making tough choices that may have some lasting impact for me! So a fear: perhaps my personality type leads me far more towards the ‘ideas’ side than the day to day management of a company - is that dangerous? More on that below.

Follower / Manager / Leader

Then some work on definitions. My thinking on what defines a manager as opposed to a leader is to do with ‘granularity’ of decision-making. The ‘important’ people I’ve had the opportunity to connect with over the last few years all seem to share the trait that their words seem to carry a lot of weight, and that it’s possible to make large strategic changes with just a few words here and there. In contrast - the managers that I know tend to be involved in making lots of small decisions more often. Perhaps this is a simplification - others disagreed.

The conclusion though - in the cultural sector, classic models of organisation structure don’t apply too well. If I look at myself, there are leaders who I work with at which point I’m a follower, there are projects where there is a leader and I am implementor/manager, and then there are the things that I directly lead on.

So, really I’m all three depending on what time of day it is and what situation I am in. A social graph type model might work well to describe this. (Could we draw a social graph of our leadership?)

Some suggested reading around these ideas came up: Herman Hesse’s The Journey to the East and Robert Greenleaf’s The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path.

Influence vs Leadership

Before I went on the day I was a little confused as to the potential difference between ‘influence’ and ‘leadership’.

I guess I had some preconceptions about what the two mean, but I think I’ve come to some relevant conclusions for myself.

“Leadership” seems to imply to me the idea of a strict corporate structure, where there is a hierarchy of people, each of whom has a number of ‘followers’.

“Influence” seems to imply changing the opinions of those leaders to achieve a particular objective by making them choose new solutions to problems or to change their decision-making behaviour.

So to be honest, I think of myself more of an ‘influencer’ than a ‘leader’ - I mean, who does anyone working in a micro-business actually lead?

The conclusion was that in the creative industries, there are loads of people operating on that micro level (Small is the new Big), so actually we may be seeing a wave of a new leadership style less defined by the size of the organisation you work for, but by the number of people you can influence with your ideas. To that end, we could be looking at self-publishing / blogging / networking (the stuff I’ve been boring people with for some time) as a potential model for micro-businesses to adopt to achieve more influence and from that become more effective leaders in that ’social graph’:

What’s clear is that in the creative industries where micro-businesses are by far the biggest group of businesses, old models of ‘leadership’ just don’t apply. A freelancer doesn’t have a line-manager, but she would have a number of people in her sphere of influence, which is a two-way thing.

I’d compare this to some of the Neural Network theory I picked up at university. The human brain relies on formal connections - neurons, but a lot of what goes on in the brain is also tied into releases of hormones and neurotransmitters which are more ’spacial’ in their effects - activating particular groups of neurons based on where that release of hormones occurs in the brain.

So - if big business are the neurons, creative micro-businesses get to be the neurotransmitters?

A bit of personality

Something we were asked to do before going down for the day was an online personality questionnaire, and on the day we worked through what some of the results meant using examples and a few scenarios. Interestingly I didn’t get my results in advanced so as well as getting the results that were spit out by the online tool, it was also nice to work through what my personality type is.

To cut a long story short, I’m an “ENTP“:

Interesting chart - so what does it mean and how is that going to help?

I’ve done a few online tests in the past - silly IQ tests, spacial awareness, pattern recognition (which I’m strangely competent at) and other ‘understand yourself’ diversions.

But this is probably the first time that I’ve actually sat down and tried to work out how to use my own knowledge of myself to influence my own decision-making.

Here’s a snippet from PersonalityPage.com:

“ENTPs are idea people.”

First line of my LinkedIn profile:

“I’m the ideas guy.”

So at least I know something about myself. How about how I work?

It turns out that ENTP types are notorious for being energetic at the beginning and ends of projects - when the idea kicks in, and when the deadline looms. Other types (Swap P - perceiving for J - judging) are more into planning things out and having a series of milestones:

Ah - so that explains why I find it much easier to do my best work under a bit of pressure, and when I’m feeling inspired. That’s good to know too. When I looked at my ‘P versus J’ count I was at 63 out of 70, meaning that I’m quite extreme in how I work like this.

So that tells me that whatever I want to it should be based on inspiration, ‘feeling it’, and not being based around lots of (oh that’s so boring) milestones - that will give me an outlet for my best work.

On the flipside though, we talked about how ‘balance’ is important for an ENTP, and some of the best teams in the world are based on an ENTP type teaming up with someone of the opposite way of working - the solid organiser to my ‘be inspired’ type.

And when I look back over the years, the times when things have worked out well were when I was joining up with someone like that, and when they didn’t it was either that that person let me down or where there was nobody to provide that structure.

Interesting… should I be hiring? / looking for a very organised collaborator right now?

This throws up a huge set of issues. At the moment I seem overloaded with ideas, connections, opportunities, things randomly winning awards (CiB and 4tips most recently). So perhaps it’s time to solidify some ideas and really push them forward in a big way. I think that might be the theme for the year for me.

Once upon a time…

Prior to the day we were sent a book - Harvard Business Review On The Mind Of The Leader (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series) and a couple of DVDs, which were different for all of us.

We spent some time discussing the stories of each of the ‘leaders’ in those films, and putting their leadership styles into a number of distinct categories based on the book.

Quite interesting then that the ‘collaborative’ style which I’ve seen being part of Creative Republic where there kind of is ‘no leader’ was the one style that didn’t seem to have a character covering it, whereas others - The ‘charismatic leader’, the ‘transactional leader’ were everywhere.

It struck me that a good way to make things happen in the world is to adopt the right style for the right situation. Sometimes it’s best just to let some things happen, others to discuss and share decision making, and at other times you need to take the reins and push a thing forward. Running your own company is the latter - if you don’t do something who’s going to?

So for micro-businesses an adaptable style of ‘leadership’ is probably best. Without the resources behind you it’s impossible to boss people around into doing things for your idea. It takes gentle cajoling, influencing and continued bits of inspiration to get people where you think you’d like them to go…

The Hero’s Journey

And to end, we personalised some of that ’story’-based work on the films into our own personal ‘journeys’ (not too happy with that term but it is relevant in this situation).

This is a well-used way of generalising some concepts about personal progress in life, and was surprisingly effective for me to frame some of the things I’ve been doing and challenges I’ve faced. Running a company and donating loads of time to non-profit work isn’t easy - bad stuff happens as well as good!

We’re all familiar with those solitary epic films where a character triumphs over adversity to complete some kind of quest. You can apply some of that thinking to your own progress using a model called “The Hero’s Journey“.

The idea, is that you can break your story up into:

• The real world
• A call to adventure
• Gathering allies
• Gaining a mentor
• A nemesis
• A turning point
• Bringing home the bacon

I paraphase, but you get the idea.

What was really interesting in this is the idea of the ‘nemesis’ - every success story has a low point where something external (or internal perhaps?) causes a hiccup in the flow, a challenge to overcome. Hitting that ‘low point’ can be terrible at the time, but looking back can actually prove to be very valuable times - they provide drive for you, something to act against to achieve what you want to do.

So, here are a few of low points I’ve had, and looking back I’m thinking that they were all helpful in some way to get me to where I am now:

Meningitis at university - I nearly had to leave when I suddenly got ill. Instead I recovered in hospital, worked harder, took all of my exams and carried on going - in fact it was lying on a hospital bed I thought that 3form would be a good idea.

Christmas 2003 - I get a phone call from my then business partner saying he’s not coming back to work (he did eventually - freelance), then a week later my programmer gets hospitalised and I’m left wondering what I’m supposed to do now - just after signing the lease on the office. What I did - refocus and went with the flow. Looking back I’d wish I’d done a few things different, but hey.

Getting let down by friends - having to readjust how I trust people around me. Deciding to focus back on what I’m doing so I can achieve big things and making sure that I put family at the top of the list. The end result - a wonderful new home office where I got to see my daughter walk for the first time last month. I’d have missed that if I’d been playing ‘distant dad’.

These particular ‘nemesis’ moments are particularly obvious when you start looking back, and the further back they are the more obvious they are. And what’s great (a few people said this) that everyone has those low points - you just need to work through them to your advantage.

A ‘hole’ in the plotline?

In that ‘hero’s journey’ list above you’ll see the slot labelled “Gaining a mentor“.

Over the years I’ve had a few people I’ve leant on for advice and guidance, but to date I’ve not had a connection with someone who’s really been there and done something similar to me. Jonathan Slade is probably the closest match to the word ‘mentor’, although his advice is based very strongly in business models, financial planning and so on. Useful stuff, but I think what I’ve been missing is a total connection with someone who’s been involved at the top level of their game in the creative scene for years, with some time on their hands to share some advice and experience.

I talk about this all the time, but seriously - how come I’ve gone so far and not made that connection yet?!

Another thing for me to do then, perhaps - make a few persistent phone calls to that certain person that I admire for what they’ve done and see if they’ll lend me a hand bouncing some ideas around on this particularly great idea I’ve been brewing this year… watch this space!

A better ‘about me’ page?

Taking a day out of a busy schedule can often seem like a challenging thing to do. Especially if you work in a micro-enterprise. Time is money.

But skills are money too, and what I got out of the day was that I need to spend some more time on my own personal development. I’ll probably sign onto their next level of training as a result.

It wasn’t mind-blowing stuff - but it certainly solidified a few things for me and it’s helped me to inform my own decision-making about where I want my career to progress, what I’m naturally good at and what I need to work on to make myself effective.

If you haven’t done anything similar I’d certainly recommend it.