Creativity Is Courageous: The Role Of Courage In Managing Creative Teams

Cameron Conaway

Courage is having a mainstream moment. Use of the word has spread beyond military stories and into the ordinary (but often profound) moments that make up our personal lives. The work of researcher-storyteller extraordinaire Brené Brown is serving as one catalyst; her writing on “ordinary courage” is front and center in most bookstores, and she even has a Netflix special titled, The Call To Courage.

Notably, courage (alongside authenticity, vulnerability and empathy) has become part of the lexicon of modern business. The word has various manifestations in the workplace, from having the courage to give and receive feedback with Radical Candor, a framework developed by Kim Scott, to the work and speeches of Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David, which link emotional courage in the workplace to improved rates of engagement. There’s even a Workplace Courage Acts Index (subscription required) that seeks to recognize and rank acts of workplace courage.

But as S&P 500 life spans are predicted to continue shrinking over the next decade, innovation is increasingly expected (and rewarded) across all departments. Top-down innovation initiatives still have their place, but the leaders driving today’s most innovative companies also realize their next big idea might trickle up — and that scaling innovation horizontally is the best way to prime the pump.

Innovation Is Creativity Made Manifest

Juxtaposed next to innovation’s importance is the alarming lack of focus placed on creativity. Executives rarely mention it, and when they do, I find they often default to using the word “innovation.” Even worse, many conversations on creativity are relegated either to obviously creative companies (ad agencies, for example) or to the creative services teams within larger organizations.

But creativity is the underpinning of innovation, and all teams across all departments are creative teams. Research suggests that engineering students are exposed to fewer creativity principles than most throughout their coursework, but this in no way means an engineering department can’t become an innovation hub. Department leaders must have the courage to build a new kind of culture. They must, in a way, see themselves as artists leading artists.

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